In 2006, I accidentally attended a major first at The Crossing. That fall, its campus ministry, Veritas, held its first meeting. College-freshman-me was in attendance.
I hated it.
I say I was there accidentally because the truth was that I had no idea what a campus ministry was. When a friend of a friend (whom I barely knew) invited me and a few other guys from my old high school to attend, I had no idea we’d be in a room with people singing worship songs and listening to a sermon. Honestly, I’d only ever seen the word “Veritas” in the 1999 movie Boondock Saints. It was tattooed on the hand of an Irish Catholic vigilante. That sounded cool.
I hated it for one reason: all the songs seemed self-hating. People singing “since I am so sick,” calling themselves “sinners,” and crying out for a savior was decidedly not cool. Cringey even. So, needless to say, I didn’t return for the second meeting.
But God had other plans.
The first semester of my freshman year turned out to be the most painful season of my life. Not because of an injury, death, or disease. But because of depression. It was the most acute, mentally painful depression I’ve ever experienced. The world lost its color. Reality was gray, dark, muddy, and muddled. I forgot what happiness and joy felt like and experienced poignant, unending self-loathing and sadness in their place.
This was 2006, well before people talked much about mental health. And unlike an injury or a disease, there’s no external proof or evidence of mental illness. No neck braces. No casts. No hair loss. You just feel this thing that no one else can see, and it seems no one else can understand, and you’re being sucked in—like a gaping black hole with teeth.
I remember sitting in my Philosophy 1000 class with Dr. Bien dismantling the concept of God. But if there is no God, what’s the point of living? Who can define right and wrong? Who can tell us tiny flecks of living dirt and water why we exist? That question mattered because existence itself was painful to me.
The good doctor offered a bad solution: existentialism. Conquer the absurdity of life by choosing your own purpose, willing your own life into existence. I couldn’t swallow that pill. Partially because it was irrational. But partially because I no longer had the will to live.
Instead, I turned to nihilism. If there was no God, then we’re just infinitesimally small creatures in an incomprehensibly large universe, floating on a pale blue dot in one solar system of a trillion trillion trillion solar systems. And one day, that pale blue dot would be destroyed in the slow heat death of the sun, and no one would remember anyone or anything from human history at all. Shoot, no one would remember me in 100 years.
And so, if nothing mattered and nothing would be remembered, what was the value of staying alive when living was a living death? Yes, some people would be hurt, but they’d move on, and their lives would be forgotten, too. So. There.
For all my cynicism about the self-hating Christians at The Crossing, the truth was that I hated myself. The other truth was that there was a small group of Christians who attended The Crossing who continually loved me during those dark days. Just moments before I was about to go through with my plan to end it all, they started calling me. The first call jarred me out of my dark reverie. The second, third, and fourth confused me. I answered the fifth.
My friend said, “Patrick, are you okay? This is super weird. And I swear I’ve never done anything like this before. But I felt like God was telling me to call you.”
I lied and told him was fine. Then I broke down in tears and decided that I would wait to kill myself until I answered the question: is God real? If he wasn’t, I’d end it. If he was, I’d have to ask him the purpose of my life and my pain.
After that I began to attend The Crossing with my friends.
Week after week, it felt like Dave and Keith were preaching directly to me. I remember Dave preaching a sermon talking about the vastness of the universe, but rather than drawing the nihilistic conclusion (our tiny lives do not matter), he drew a theological conclusion:
“What is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him? Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor.” Psalm 8:4-5
I began to attend a freshman men’s Bible study led by a seminary student named Kermit Summerall. He expanded my soul and showed me that the Bible was not only eminently fascinating—it was radiant with beauty, life, and wisdom.
On Easter Sunday of 2007, I gave my life to Jesus at a midnight service. When I came back, I was all in for God, Jesus, Christianity, The Crossing—all of it, all the time. The next year, I threw myself headfirst into Veritas. I met my (now) wife, Emily, at the first Veritas of that year. She was beautiful and had a beautiful voice, and after a few social events, we were dating.
I don’t remember when it happened, but by the end of that year I knew I felt called to ministry. And I wanted to do that ministry at The Crossing.
I interned with Veritas that summer, and Ryan Wampler introduced me to the theologians, pastors, and thinkers who still shape me to this day. The next year, I attended a conference with Veritas in Minnesota. That’s where I met a random frat dude who was on crutches, and so I pushed him around in a wheelchair. His name was Addison Hawkins. He and his wife Lynnette later became two of our best friends, and now he’s a pastor at The Crossing.
I could tell endless stories. About the small group we started in 2011 that’s still going strong. About the dear friends I’ve made along the way. About having children and raising them in a church that loves them and doesn’t treat them strangely for being pastor kids. I could tell stories about hard seasons. About people showing up to love me and my family.
But here’s the undeniable fact: I can’t tell my story or my family’s story without The Crossing.
I haven’t been here since the first day, but my first days as a Christian started here. And I will forever be grateful for how God used The Crossing to rescue me, to love me, and to sanctify me.
And that’s precisely why I never want to leave this church, because I believe that the next 25 years will be filled with more stories like my own. If God so wills it, I pray I’ll be a part of those unwritten chapters.
