Attending a Christian university, especially a tight-knit one like ACU, puts students in an environment where they have the opportunity to meet a lot of new people.
Local coffee shops are full of students meeting to talk who want to get to know each other more. The Bean makes it easy to invite new friends to share a meal with each other. And each semester brings classrooms filled with new faces.
There seems to be a constant flow of new friendships being formed.
Meeting a lot of new people is fun and manageable in college, but what does it look like outside of a university campus?
There is an intentional community of Christians in Chicago, Ill. called Jesus People USA (JPUSA).
JPUSA is a group of about 400 people of all walks of life that live together in a renovated hotel, use the common purse system for finances, and are constantly welcoming new members and seeing off members that move on to other things.
They are also a community that consistently welcomes a great number of short-term guests and travelers into their community.
I spent Spring Break at JPUSA and was able to glimpse some of the attitudes of the residents there. I fully expected them to be disinterested in new people, since making new friends is more of a daily occurrence to them.
However, I was surprised by just how many members of the community made intentional efforts to develop a friendship, even in a week, with the full knowledge that they may never see me again.
Even one of the original founders of JPUSA, who has been living in that kind of a setting for over 40 years, took the time to eat lunch with some friends and I and had a desire to get to know us.
This woman disproved my theory that the ACU environment could not be maintained for a lifetime.
I had assumed that it would get tiresome to have new faces coming and going in life so frequently.
Not only was she maintaining it, but she still showed excitement in sharing her stories with new people and was equally excited to hear our stories, though she had heard many more before we came along.
Meeting new people and sharing life with them is exciting. It’s exciting to expand one’s personal network and to feel connected with a broader expanse of individuals.
There is so much to learn from such a diverse world of people that spending time with new people remains rewarding and uplifting.
Meeting new people is one of those things that never really gets old. Each new person in life brings in the possibility of a new good story to tell, a new lasting friendship, a new lesson learned, or even a new chance to bless someone else with what you have to offer.
