Set Free - by Freshmen?!

At the end of a challenging week of school when it felt like almost everyone had a midterm, it was great to gather back together this Friday at Durant Loft for Klesis Weekly! To mix things up a bit, we had a special Friday that was entirely hosted by freshmen, from the food to the icebreakers in the beginning to the special elements that came later (keep reading to find out).

After an absurd icebreaker where we tried our best to match extremely zoomed in pictures to real-world objects, our night started with a skit by the freshmen, who had been preparing for this performance all week. The main character in the story was a new student on campus, and she gets involved in all sorts of activities and clubs, meeting new people and doing her best to fit in to these different groups. But by spreading herself out so thinly, the character and the audience are left to wonder who she really is and what her true identity is.

The skit actually was related to our message on Friday based on a new two-part series called “Set Free.” We all saw how the girl in the skit was chained to the perception that other people had of her, and this led to her questioning life itself. On the other hand, there’s a character of a man in the Bible, in Mark 5, where a man is supposedly free because he’s someone living on his own, living a wild and unrestrained life. Kevan showed us how the text tells us that he has some unclean spirits inside him, that there’s something not right internally. Jesus of Nazareth, a person of the Bible that Klesis has been reading about and analyzing over the course of this semester, comes into the picture and ends up actually driving the messed-up spirits out of this man and into some nearby pigs.

Unfortunately for the people in this town, the pigs that now have the spirits all fall into the sea die, but you’d think there would be much rejoicing over the fact that the crazy man is now clean and whole, by the power of Jesus. And here we saw another form of being chained to something else, not quite so obvious. The villagers, being absolutely bound to their economic gains, find themselves unable to be happy over the salvation of one of their own, and instead are so bitter at Jesus for the loss of their pigs that they cast him out to the city. But this story has a happy ending, with the healed man proclaiming to his friends, family and everyone he knows about this amazing man called Jesus and what he has done in his life. And at the very end, Kevan presented us with an all-important question to examine ourselves and honestly ask what we may be chained by and how that’s preventing us from being truly set free. Finally, some of the most talented freshmen performed “Come Home Running” to close out our time at Durant Loft. It was an incredible job by the musicians, and a song that spoke to each of us in different ways.

We all took off to the RSF afterwards for our awesome and action-packed sports night. With three games going on at all times, with yoga balls, dodgeballs and basketballs, we all had a blast competing hard and making new friends. At the end of the day, the team of seniors that had probably the most questionable team name (Shiny Quadriceps???), actually took home first place in a nail-biter to the finish. It was a fun-filled time for everyone involved, whether we had extensive experience with sports or not, and we hope to see you next time!