The Joys of Fellowship

The Princeton Evangelical Fellowship was the reason I came to Princeton. When researching colleges as an anxious high school senior, I'd come across its website, and, once admitted, I came down to Princeton to check out the campus as a bona fide pre-frosh. I met with a staff member from PEF, who took me out for coffee and showed me around the campus for three hours. As we walked around that night, we repeatedly encountered PEF members just randomly out for a stroll, all of whom raved about PEF and encouraged me to come to Princeton. The next morning, I had breakfast with a current student, and we talked about PEF and Princeton. I left Princeton to return home that April absolutely convinced that this was the place where I was supposed to be.

Now, four years later, PEF is most assuredly the best thing to happen to me at Princeton. I can worship God with other Christians, give and receive spiritual and emotional encouragement and grow in my Christian faith through good teaching. It is the source of many of my closest friends at Princeton, a base from which to interact with the larger University community and a place to retreat to when life at Princeton becomes too intense or frustrating. In many ways, PEF is like a family. We are all fallible people; we all make mistakes. But it is a group of people who will accept me just as I am, no matter whether I'm angry, de-pressed, exuberant or just so-so. I have nothing to prove to them, any façade I put up is purely of my own creation.

But PEF is hardly just some kind of spiritual support group. One of its primary functions is to challenge and shape my worldview as a Christian. At this point in my Princeton career (the end), I am primarily concerned with what will prepare me to handle life after college when none of us have the comforting social structures to which we are accustomed at Princeton. PEF has prepared me morally and spiritually for life after Princeton, much more so than any class I've taken here over the past four years. The teaching of the staff members and conversations I've had with other students in PEF have shaped my thinking to an unbelievable degree. I came to Princeton unsure of what I believed. As I graduate I'm a lot more confident of what I believe, and just why I do.

PEF has forced me to think and intellectually humbled me more than any academic experience. Many people seem to think that Christians are intellectually calcified, blindly receiving teaching from on high. This is just not true of Christians at Princeton. Operating from the basic concept that there is indeed one Truth out there, I have been forced to defend my beliefs in the face of sometimes hostile criticism and to do it with great care, hating the evil of this world, yet loving its people. This is not always easy to do. My mind has been stretched until it hurts. I have had some vehement disagreements in my classes, but idle precept talk, often forgotten the second class ends, is much different from discussion about the core values that animate each of us as moral beings. These stick with us for life, even if we don't realize that they do. Now, armed with these core values, what I know to be the Truth, being ejected from Princeton is still a frightening thought. But I leave equipped with the spiritual and moral tools to live in the real world as a mature adult, an upright member of the community and eventually (hopefully) a devoted husband and father.

Princeton relies on alumni giving to provide a high quality education to its current students. And I have learned a lot in classes at Princeton. They tell me that the full price of educating us is higher than tuition, so I'm willing to give a little back in appreciation. PEF, which is 70 years old this year, is itself generously provided for by the donations of about 700 Princeton alumni. They are grateful for the spiritual growth they saw as a result of involvement in PEF during their Princeton years, and they wish to see that work continued. I do too. No matter how much money I rake in over the years as my Princeton degree begins to work its magic, I will support PEF. I graduate with fond memories of Princeton, but I am especially thankful for PEF.

(Justin Hastings is a Wilson School major from Bedford, Mass. He can be reached at justinh@princeton.edu)