PLNU graduates reflect on evolution of faith

As Point Loma Nazarene University fourth-year students are preparing to graduate in May, they reflect on how their faith has or hasn’t developed.

PLNU’s mission is to promote a Christian community where “minds are engaged and challenged, character is modeled and formed, and service is an expression of faith.” 

Aspects of this mission statement are embodied in the faith journeys of different students.

Emily Baumgartner, a fourth-year literature major, said their faith felt more like it belonged to their parents when they started college, and that now they know more about what it means in their own life.

“I feel like I entered college in a very tumultuous space in my faith. And I’m still very much living that now,” Baumgertner said. “But I think I’ve found people that encourage me to live in that tumultuous space, rather than trying to solve it immediately.” 

Emily Lindenmayer, a fourth-year political science major, felt similarly about her faith at the start of college. 

“It was not my own,” Lindenmayer said. “When I started college, my family had just left a church, and so I was feeling kind of without a church community. … No one had ever really taught me how to do Christianity by myself, and so … I kind of flopped around like a fish out of water for a little bit.”

In her first year at PLNU, she said she prioritized grades, making friends and getting involved over sorting out her faith. This was until she went on tour with the Point Loma Singers during her second semester. 

“I realized that the people that I was surrounding myself with could hear the voice of God so clearly, and I didn’t remember the last time I had heard the voice of God,” Lindenmayer said. 

“There was this one really crazy night where me and two of my closest friends couldn’t sleep, and … they had felt some sort of spiritual tension in the group and on the trip,” Lindenmayer said. “And it’d gotten to the way small hours of the morning, like 1, 2, 3 in the morning, and they just kept praying and praying and praying, … and I was completely overwhelmed. … I had never seen people pray as intently as they had.”

They invited her to pray with them. 

“I opened my mouth, and the words just kept coming out,” Lindenmayer said. 

Leadership has been a significant part of the faith of Maya Valverde, a fourth-year commercial music major. She is one of the leaders of Delight, a girls’ small group on campus, is involved in All Saints Church and was a worship leader at Kamp Love for the first time this year. In her second and third years, she was a resident assistant in Finch Hall. 

“Getting to be supported by leaders like Amy [Dickerson, resident director of Finch Hall], who believed in me in ways I didn’t even believe in me, grew my confidence and also my faith in the ways that the Lord saw me,” Valverde said. 

Valverde started at PLNU as an undeclared major, and as she completed her general education classes, she started wrestling with her call to ministry and her worries about making money in the future. 

“I felt God put on my heart, as I was seeking him and seeking to hear his voice, ‘Well, why don’t you take a step of faith and trust me and do what I’ve told you that I want you to do?’” Valverde said. “I kind of felt like if I took that step of faith, I probably wasn’t going to go back.”

“I’ve learned that he’s even better than I thought,” Valverde said. “And can be known deeper than I could’ve imagined. And I imagine it’s gonna be that way forever.”

Isabelle Lawton, a fourth-year accounting major, said she used to test God like Gideon did, asking for small miracles like a fixed water fountain spout, as proof he existed.

“I pushed [the button] again,” Lawton said. “Huge stream of water comes out. … I just think that’s a really cool way that God, like, showed up for me in a really weird way. But he knew that, I really was testing him to a degree, and he was like, ‘I can do that, and I’m going to do that.”

For Lawton, fully understanding her faith came in sixth grade, when a speaker at a youth camp walked the campers through the suffering and crucifixion of Jesus in extreme detail. 

“Wow,” Lawton said she remembered thinking. “He did all of this for me, you know?” 

Her faith didn’t change much in her first couple of years in college, but she had many conversations with people that eventually taught her to lean more into the Holy Spirit. 

“People are a lot more casual about praying for people one-on-one [here],” Lawton said. “It really taught me to focus even more on prayer as a tool and praying, like, not from a script, and more personal prayers.”

Lawton’s dad, who was raised in the Nazarene church, raised their family without a specific denomination and was recently confirmed in the Catholic church after years of wrestling with theological questions about Catholic doctrine. This was difficult for Lawton. 

“I kind of went to my dad for all of my faith questions before that,” Lawton said. 

However, as she’s been wrestling with those same theological questions herself, she’s found herself less opposed to the idea of Catholicism.

“I’ve switched from, ‘Oh, maybe somewhere far in the future, but like really not really,’ to ‘Maybe sometime not far in the future, but I need to work out a couple things,’” Lawton said. 

Lawton and Baumgartner have both immersed themselves in new questions.

“I think being able to study the Bible in a more academic space has … showed me that there are very academic people that deal with these same questions and don’t have those answers,” Baumgartner said. “Allowing myself to ask these questions has made me a little bit less angry.”