Prompted to bless the dorms

Scott Brill

At the end of my sophomore year at Purdue (in the early 1980s), I went to Chapter Camp at Cedar Campus. Our leadership team had a great time and finished the week full of vision and excitement for what God could do on campus in the fall. I returned to campus at the end of camp and had to wait for a day before driving home for the summer to Connecticut. I felt led that day to go on a prayer walk around campus. I had a very real sense of God’s presence and his love for the campus as I walked, and felt his prompting to go into each dorm I passed to pray a blessing on it and ask God to raise up a witness there. I made it into most of the dorms, although some were locked or otherwise inaccessible.

That next fall, God began to work powerfully in our I-V chapter, and the group grew from around 20 to nearly 100 by the time I graduated (and larger for several years afterward). Growth came especially through small-group Bible studies. It was during some reflecting on that growth at the end of my senior year that I realized an I-V small group had begun to meet in each of the dorms that I had prayed in two years before, but there was not a single one in the dorms I had been unable to get into. While I don’t believe there was anything magical about where I prayed or didn’t pray that day in May 1981, obviously God was bringing me in on something far bigger than I was aware of at the time!