In my last monthly newsletter I shared about a tool that Cru uses called "Soularium." Because we live in such a visual culture, we've developed a tool to use photos to initiate spiritual conversations. It's easy to use the photos to learn more about the person you're meeting with, and also easy to transition into a Gospel presentation after the photo survey is done.
I love this tool. I've even used it with my Cru staff team and modified the survey so that we can learn more about their lives and where they are at in their walk with the Lord. Another great benefit of using the photo tool - it's FUN!
Anyway, part of my letter briefly shared the story about a college student in Uruguay called Federico. He has a pretty great story and I couldn't fit it all into my newsletter, so here's the full story. There are a few typos and odd statements but I wanted to keep the full integrity of his letter. It's a long story, but definitely worth reading. Enjoy!
Federico writes:
I once believed in God, when I was little. My family raised me Catholic and so we “believe in God” but the truth is, like most people in my country, we seldom practice religion.
I stopped believing in the existence of God when I entered High School, since then my faith had only declined: from professing Catholicism I became agnostic only to quickly embrace a strong atheism. My reluctance to religion was such that I even thought for a long time that Jesus, the man, had never existed. Furthermore, in the “spectrum of theistic probability” that Richard Dawkins talks in The God Delusion I placed myself –like Dawkins– as a 6.9 (the spectrum goes from 1 to 7).
When I was in my first year of College a group of US students approached me wanting to do a survey with images. It wasn’t until later that I found that it was a spiritual survey called Soularium. I don’t know why but I didn’t start a debate about religion and God like I usually did.
Instead, we talked and exchange Facebook profiles and never talked again. I didn’t know that they were part of a Summer Project held by Cru.
My story continues two years later when a series of highly coordinated events took place. First I enrolled to a seminar by mistake. The seminar took place five Thursdays and in order to get the credit you had to attend four of the five talks. I went to the first one but then I missed the next two. When I went to the third I talked with the teacher about it and he said he would see what he could do. I knew I wasn’t going to get the credit and the seminar wasn’t something I wanted to do in the first place, but anyways I attended the last talk and it blew my mind. The topic of the seminar was “Philosophy between Science and Religion” and the speaker was a teacher at my university that has a P.H.D. in the field and is one of the most respected philosophers of South America –things I didn’t know until the last day.
What started as a way to get a credit ended with a conversation that made me realize the existence of God. But I wasn’t prepared to have a personal relationship with Him or similar, instead what my teacher explained to me was that it is one thing to philosophically understand the existence of God and another very different thing is religion. So I was fine accepting God but not religion, especially because I wasn’t sure what religion was right or different from the others.
And here is where Cru gets involved again. First I met one STINTer at one of my college campuses, but I had to go, so I only grasped his first name. Then, two weeks later I was studying for my finals and so when I passed the entrance of the college I see a girl holding the same pictures from the survey I took two years before. I knew they were from the US so I walked into them and asked to take the survey. After finishing the survey they explained to me what Cru is, their mission and vision, and doing chitchat I asked if they knew the guy I met two weeks earlier and they said they did.
So I met with the guy again and he explained Christianity in a way I had never heard before. Then he invited me to the last Cru meeting of the year. I wasn’t sure but I decided to go anyways. At the end of the event they presented a camp, I was on my vacations so I went. It wasn’t what I had in mind but I liked it in some way. One of the last nights I finally accepted Jesus. Later, talking with the stinters, they told me that it was very odd how I met them: I was the only one who the first stint/er talked with in that campus, and the second group that I encountered in the other campus said they never went to campus in the morning.
The last day of camp the staff of Cru invited everyone to a Summer Project, pointing out the theme of the camp “Formers of Movements that Transform the Nations.” For my perspective it was God who was calling me to go, so I did.
At first I was going to stay just for a few days, but seeing how much everyone was excited to share and the love of the family that was hosting us I prayed to stay the whole first week. And I could stay! Then out of nowhere my parents allowed me to stay until the weekend after that. I was learning so much about Christianity and how to develop my personal relationship with God that I liked every moment of the camp, especially the times when we shared the Gospel.
So I prayed again to stay the whole second –and last– week because I couldn’t stay but had to study for my exams instead. But God surprised me again and I could stay the whole Summer Project (Amy here -- this project is similar to our American summer projects and was the first time we tried them in Uruguay.)
Those three weeks –one at camp and two at the Summer Project– felt like a year, but in a good and special way. From being a strong ten-year atheist I became a Christian willing to share the Gospel, the change of my life and His grace with everyone I could (family, friends and classmates).
