Noah

For an entire year of Noah's senior year, the two of us were laboring side by side on campus and inside the Fiji fraternity. All spring we tried to start a Bible study but there was no interest. We invited guys over for dinner — they had no spiritual hunger. By the start of fall, we felt pretty defeated.

But God was working. By the end of that fall, the picture had completely changed: 5–6 brothers were consistently coming to Bible study to learn about Christ, one freshman gave his life to Christ, and 7 more were showing serious spiritual hunger.

Slow work. Faithful work. The kind of work that doesn't look like much for months and then suddenly does.

Discipleship doesn't happen in a single meeting. It happens over a thousand small ones — cooking eggs in the morning, hiking on weekends, sitting in the kitchen, going to SMC together. The fruit you see in someone's life later traces back to a season of just being together.

As Noah's senior year came to a close, the question stopped being what am I doing with my life and became where does God want me to go?

He told me he wanted to go into full-time ministry — either overseas, or with StuMo somewhere in the States. He wanted to give his post-college years to the same work we had been doing together inside the Fiji house.

Today, Noah is serving full-time with StuMo's team in Tokyo, Japan. Japan is one of the most spiritually unreached countries in the developed world — less than 1% of the population identifies as Christian. The opportunity is massive and the laborers are few.

Noah is one of them. He's in Tokyo learning the language, building relationships with Japanese university students, and doing in Japanese cities what he learned to do in a UofA fraternity house — initiate, share, disciple, multiply.

And in a beautiful piece of providence, some of the Japanese students Noah is now ministering to in Tokyo are the same ones who first met Christ in Tucson.