September 11, 2025 "Waking up to different"

Waking up to a different world, city, campus, courtyard.

Last night, we had a prayer meeting for our campus with our students many who were on campus in the buildings surrounding the courtyard or at the event itself.  

Tears have come at different times, but the most shocking and disturbing moments are when I see my courtyard and my campus, my home on national tv.  Utah Valley University, where I have, along with Daran, prayed, cried, and laughed for 13 years.  

That courtyard is where I do one on ones with students and staff.  It’s where I approached two atheists that became my friends.  It’s where I’ve taken pictures with Willy the Wolverine (our school mascot). That courtyard is where we have had intense prayer meetings.

Our campus is strange to say the least.  When we came, we were the huge minority religiously speaking, sometimes not even making the list, as our Christian student population was almost non-existent at .01%.  We came to a campus of 33,000 students with no Christian clubs at all 13 years ago.  

And today, we are one of two Christian clubs on campus, with a population of 44,000 and the Christian population moving up to closer to 1%.  

All we have wanted for our campus is revival.  We have prayed it and pleaded for it knowing that this would be the most unlikely place in the US for it to occur.  This last year has shown us miracle after miracle as students have come to know Jesus.  

Two nights before the shooting, our student leaders gathered at our home.  Daran was to speak but in an unprecedented turn of events could not get the words out.  We walked away after collectively kneeling and praying, knowing that God had joined us all together for an outpouring of His Spirit.  We yelled out what we wanted UVU students to be set free from and then collectively yelled, “Jesus do the battle.”

The night before the shooting, in another unprecedented moment, I was finishing up my sermon with such heaviness.  I could not finish it.  I heard God specifically say that I was just to take my Bible up with no notes and let Him speak.  It was terrifying and peace inducing at the same time as I preached about eternity and the choice that must be made for or against God.  I emphasized the urgency because time is short.

Two students stood up and gave their lives to Jesus that night and then the morning came…

and my campus was in the bullseye of the world not for revival as I had hoped but for utter tragedy.  

But God…

Last night as we prayed, I told the student leaders that we have been prepared “for such a time as this…”  I said it, but they already knew it because they have been on this same miraculous journey hand in hand with us.  

So pray for us, because your prayers are what we always need most to gather a grieving, troubled, scared student population away from their phones and unhealthy coping mechanisms into the arms of Jesus.