CIU in SC

Cloudy skies greeted us this morning in Columbia, South Carolina as we made our way to the campus of Columbia International University.

Although the weather forecast said it would get up to 75 today, it was a cool 42 degrees this morning as we walked onto the campus for our day with students. I could literally see my breath, though the foliage still said it was late summer/early fall!

I remember first hearing about CIU nearly thirty years ago when one of our new missionaries with Malachi Ministries in Germany joined our team. At that time it was the "Moody" of the East Coast, another Bible college with a great reputation for sending out many to the mission field.

Dave and I took this photo before walking into the student center, and I sent it to that friend just to let her know we'd finally made it onto her campus...albeit, many years later!

Our US mobilizer, Mike Sullivan, met us here in the student center this morning, and right away we began having conversations with students.

In fact, the day was so packed full of conversations that I barely took any pictures though I kept wanting to! I did manage to take one when we had a short pause between talking with students.

We found the students here to be so engaging, curious, mission minded, and full of love for their school and professors! It was a refreshing morning of conversations with them.

Finally it was time to head over to chapel, where Dave would be speaking to the student body.

As students came in, we continued to have conversations right up until it was time for chapel to start.

I love that Mike photo bombed this picture we took right before chapel started!

After worship and announcements, Dave came up to speak, sharing some about Josiah Venture and the opportunity to spend the summer serving with us. After encouraging them to come visit us in the student center, he moved into his message for them.

They were very responsive, verbally and physically responding when he invited them to follow him with their thumbs as he talked about how you can get very narrow in your perspective when you concentrate only on you and your thumb!

At some point his message should be up on their website, though it's not there yet. But his topic of "Worry Removal" definitely hit a sensitive place in the lives of these college students.

We had so many good interactions with students the rest of the day - I hope some of them will hear God's call to join us next summer as JV interns!