I love the never-ending supply implied in the verse “Freely ye have received, freely give.” I have seen this proven in a CSO I have worked with recently. At one event, the CSO was hoping to get just 20 people to sign up. They needed 20 interested people to be recognized by the university club organization. During that event, during a religious group fair, the CSO had many people attend the event and got their 20 interested people, but not many more. During the most recent event, held during the same religious awareness week, the CSO’s focus shifted—not to collect a ton of interested students’ emails, but to give freely. The CSO wanted to give a gift to the community—FREELY! The event was received very well. In fact more than 400 people attended. More than 200 signed up to receive more information about the CSO’s future events. It was an overwhelming response. Later the CSO president shared with me how he had broadened his view from getting a certain number of people interested, to freely giving a gift to anyone that walked by.

I think the CSO, during the second event, had the kind of attitude Mary Baker Eddy intended for CSOs. Giving freely to the college campus takes any sense of self out the equation (including self-consciousness when sharing Christian Science with our contemporaries). I love working with CSOs and I hope you do too!

The theme for RAW 2009 was “Let’s Talk About…”  I liked the idea of having another lecture during the week, but the traditional lecture format didn’t seem to draw many students.  Thanks to the suggestion and encouragement from TMCYouth, we planned to hold a short lecture/concert that would be repeated a few times within the slot that we had been allotted.  Since I was aware of the other topics being presented during RAW, I felt that Christian Science Healing would be an appropriate topic for the CSO event.  We called it, “Let’s Rock and Talk about Healing.”

I knew this event would require more planning than arranging a club meeting or even a normal lecture.  However, I knew that God was providing each of the tools and opportunities I needed to accomplish this Christ-based task.  Each of my interactions with TMCYouth, our local branch church, the UNF Interfaith Office, the Club Alliance, and Student Affairs went very well.  I had somewhat rough interactions with the University offices from time to time, but when I realized the event was in God’s hands, and not in mine, the arrangement (or orchestration of events, if you will) fell right into place.

Then we needed to figure out who would be speaking and playing at the event.  Again, another potentially difficult scheduling task was accomplished easily.  With some helpful hints from TMCYouth and a lot of prayer, David Stevens was the lecturer and George Clements the musician.  It was so helpful to work with the idea that God’s angels speak to everyone, sending the same loving message.

The day of the event had finally arrived.  I was struggling with feeling sick at home, but everything else seemed to be lining up well.  My wife, Avery, had graciously planned to take the day off from law school, my mother-in-law from her work, a number of others from their daily activities, and my parents were visiting and were happy to help out too.  It turned out that I did not attend the event that I had planned for an entire semester.  However, that work was really rest in action.  Since God rests in action, so can we.  Sharing the Christ spirit never impoverishes, but only enriches, enlarges, purifies, and elevates.

The event reached several hundred students, including many professors and staff members.  Although our CSO is registered with the UNF Student Club Alliance, its mission is to make Christian Science available to staff and faculty as well as to students.  We served pizza and other snacks to over 200 students, staff and faculty.  Many more people simply came to hear David Stevens speak and to hear George Clements sing and play his guitar.  We gave away many free copies of Science and Health.  And every now and then, I’ll see someone on campus reading a copy.

As a CSO, we had never reached this many people with one event.  It was exciting to see and realize that Christian Science is so appealing to mankind, and it isn’t something just for those in Sunday School and in Church, but for everyone, including college students.  We have spring CSO meetings coming up this semester, and although I don’t expect 200 students to show up in the small meeting room where we meet, I feel confident that Christian Science will reach and inspire those that are called to be there.

It certainly hasn’t been easy being the only student in my CSO.  I am so grateful to have put myself out there, and tried to accomplish a big event with the CSO.  But really, was I putting myself out there?  No.  I was never out of God’s care, never out of the atmosphere of Love, divine.  It may be difficult to remember this sometimes, but I know that every interaction is simply an opportunity to communicate God’s love for man and man’s love for man with another member of God’s family.  It’s simple and universal, and I’m so very grateful.  This semester’s going to rock.

Paul

What were your expectations from this event? How did you prepare for it?

To be completely honest, my expectations were relatively low initially. I’m not in residence at Yale right now, and there hasn’t been much activity among other Christian Scientists on campus.I contacted some of the different groups (interfaith, Yale Institute for Religion, Science, and Technology) to see if there was any interest in either a second lecture or an informal discussion of some sort, but didn’t get any response.To top it all off, the last lecture we did on main campus, we only had one person show up who was not in the CSO.So in spite of having had several successful events in the last few years at Yale, it was a bit of a Ninevah-Tarshish experience for me.

What turned it around was finally buckling down and really praying about it.The story of Lazarus showed up in the Lesson one week.What struck me was that at the beginning of the account, when Jesus says that he’s going to wake Lazarus up, the disciples questioned him saying that the last time he’d gone there, he was run out of the city by an angry mob (paraphrase).But Jesus went anyways because he was sure of the divine inspiration lighting and protecting his way.That became my key angel for this lecture—this campus that seemed to be so deadened to spiritual thought and religious dialogue was in fact just sleeping, and I was being asked to support the presence of the Christ going to wake people up—even though it might have seemed like the mental climate was four days gone.It didn’t matter that the last time (be it previous lectures on campus or discussions with friends, professors, whatever) the Christ was chased out.The Christ was needed now to raise the dead.

Gradually, things began to turn around.I found out that Daniel had someone who could make flyers for us, a task that I was really not looking forward to since graphic design is not my thing.She was able to turn them around for me with very short notice, and I happened to be on campus that Friday for other meetings and could post them.2 of the other Christian Scientists on campus expressed an interest in helping with hanging posters and meeting with Daniel.The chaplains office was able to get us a great room. Details just fell together.

Daniel suggested that we go out the day of the lecture and re-post flyers with TODAY written on them.He wanted to see the campus anyways, so he and I went out and did that.It was definitely a really smart idea.I can’t say whether it was those flyers that brought people or not, but we did find that several of our flyers that had been put up were no longer up, so it was good to re-post on the day of the event.

What was your overall response to this event?

The overall response to the event was good, on the whole.We had about 10 individuals show up, only 3 of who were CSO/church members.Because it was a smaller group, we decided to make it less formal and have everyone just make a circle.Rather than doing a formal lecture, Daniel opened up for Q&A throughout the talk.It was definitely a tough audience.One church member and CSO alum commented that there was a lot of “intellectual teeth gnashing”.It was really interesting to see how some of the students almost resented the use of science in this way—objecting to the fact that it wasn’t experimental, that healings were just anecdotes, and that “you couldn’t do this type of science at Cambridge”.I was also quite surprised that we had two people bring up the question of the moral implications of relying on Christian Science for healing with children, a topic which I’ve never heard come up at a CSO lecture before.One of those individuals was in the med school, so it was more understandable from that standpoint.Daniel was able to gracefully assure them that this was not a matter of blind faith at the expense of our children, but informed choices based on a history of experiencing healing.To say the least, Daniel was consistently hammered with questions. There was also one individual who considered himself to be born again and a Christian, though he did not identify with fundamentalism, and in fact disliked that theology.He was really interested in the ideas Daniel shared, stayed after to talk with us for about an hour and took a Science and Health with him.

Though it was a tough crowd, you could definitely say that thought was moving, and that to me was a success.

- Inge