a testimony of identity
The story of Haley Gillespie and her walk with God at JMU
Haley has always been a highly motivated person. She has excelled at everything she does: art, dance, school, design and friendships. She sought to excel at everything she did. Through her achievements in these areas she gained a sense of identity and satisfaction that fueled her. This personality trait never felt anything outside of good. However, when it came to the realm of church and her relationship with God… her performance never seemed up to par. She watched other “good christians” around her doing all of the things that “good christians” are supposed to do: reading the bible everyday, praying, being perfectly moral, sharing their faith and these were things that she just couldn’t seem to excel in. Her pursuits of faith often left her feeling worthless, helpless and like a failure. God couldn’t love her in her failure, it didn’t seem possible.
When COVID-19 shut down school, dance, and anything that continued to feed her sense of achievement and performance, her world was rocked. Her identity was shaken. Her achievements were put on hold. She wasn’t even afraid of the virus itself, instead she was afraid that she would never return to her normal life again. Fortunately, JMU reopened in the fall of 2021 allowing her to return to the studies that fueled her. She put her head down and promised herself that she would excel. The faith practices that she had been pursuing suddenly fell to the back burner. She never again went to meetings of the faith community she had attended freshman year. This began the dark two years that followed her sophomore and junior year. To escape the dark feelings that she ran from, she began to engage in other activities that “good christians” would never do.
Haley came into her senior year in 2022 feeling lost and like a shell of herself. She felt further from God than she ever had. She broke down before the start of the academic year to a trusted best friend from childhood. Her friend reminded her of a simple truth that the Gospel of Jesus makes known to us: nothing she had done in the past two years could possibly change the way God sees her because of the sacrifice of Jesus. The friend encouraged her to rejoin a faith community and shared contact info of the leaders for the BCM at JMU restart. Haley took a chance and filled out an interest form for the BCM at JMU.
The Sunday before the semester began, Haley met Chelsea, a staff member at BCM for bagels and coffee after church the last Sunday before school started. She expected a light-hearted conversation with all of the traditional senior year get-to-know-you questions, but instead was met with deeper, heartfelt questions that made her feel pursued in the midst of her darkness. Haley didn’t feel intimidated, only drawn in. How could in only one meeting she could feel so loved by someone who was just a stranger a few hours before? Haley felt a spark of hope that maybe, perhaps, God did love her. Perhaps God was pursuing her through this connection.
After her undeniable connection to a staff member, Haley felt inclined to go to all of the BCM events that she could. She barely recognized herself compared to the girl who put her head down and ignored the community for two years to succeed in school. However, she began to notice that as she put school on hold to participate deeply in the budding community of JMU BCM, she actually became less anxious about her schoolwork, even feeling rested and more prepared for schoolwork when she did return home to complete projects and tasks. She agreed to even more BCM events, including a weekly discipleship meeting with a fellow student and the same staff member she grabbed bagels with.
Haley was familiar with small groups, bible studies and other church type groups. However, her experience in the discipleship group was very different. For the first time, someone helped her identify blocks that had kept her from knowing and enjoying God. In the group she was met face-to-face with the reality that her performance-based way of viewing her relationship with God is what actually kept her from knowing and enjoying Him. She learned that her own story that includes brokenness has kept her from seeing things in the correct light with how God sees her and loves her due to past experiences. She learned that the relationship with God that was made possible through Jesus’ death on the cross is what fueled a dive into scripture and prayer. She learned that God does not fail as people do, and that people cannot love us in the same way God does: perfectly and sacrificially.
Haley began to thrive her senior year. She engaged deeply with other women within the BCM, even taking on small leadership roles here and there, going on mission trips and gathering community around her. She hosted a prayer night at her apartment, encouraging other ladies to use artistic gifts to express prayer and devotion to the Lord. She began to enjoy God, starting a regular prayer journal and keeping track of all of the ways that God was seeing her and interacting with her in her daily walk with Him. Haley shed the weight that she had been carrying of having to be a “good christian” to be loved by God. She accepted His love as she was that Sunday before school at the bagel shop her senior year: broken as she had ever been. Haley began to learn that her identity as His beloved didn’t require a performance. She felt the weight of Romans 5:8 (But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us). As she finished her senior year, she even decided to spend her first graduate year as an intern for the BCM trying to give back what was given to her and leaning into this newfound life and calling she received as a student.
This year, BCM is proud to announce that Haley will now be joining our staff as a full-time campus minister at JMU BCM. Her passion is to share the love of God with students as they enter this critical time away from their families and influences for the first time in their lives. She loves to walk with students who struggle with similar identity problems that she has walked through and encourages them to walk closer with God to understand their role in the world, who they are and recenter from the myriad voices that want their attention and focus during their time at JMU. Haley is very much looking forward to her first year serving in ministry full-time.