From Burden to Blessing

At our recent Conference on Ministry, the clergy of the Florida-Bahamas Synod gathered to pray, worship, and reflect together. This year, the campus ministers were entrusted with designing and leading worship for our colleagues. Among the stations set up for prayer, we invited pastors, deacons, and church leaders to take a simple stone, write on it something they longed to give up to God, and lay it at the base of the cross. By the end of worship, the space around the cross was filled with the weight of honest confessions: fear, sickness, grief, exhaustion, guilt, uncertainty.

Those stones became holy ground.

A week later, I carried those same rocks to our Fall Retreat with a dozen college students. These students— many of whom are wrestling with their own questions about faith, identity, and the church— gathered around tables with paintbrushes and acrylic paint pens in hand. They didn’t know who wrote the words beneath the layers of paint, but they understood the gravity of what they were holding. Slowly and carefully, they painted over the burdens laid down by the clergy of this synod. They turned confessions into color, fear into beauty, pain into possibility.

Then, they carried these stones and placed them around the camp. A few by the chapel. Some near the walking trails. Others tucked away where campers might unexpectedly stumble upon a small, bright stone. A word of hope. A quiet reminder that someone has been here before, has prayed here before, has laid something down here before.

This is the church at its best— not siloed ministries, but shared ministry. Our clergy offering up their pain. Our students transforming it into hope. And campers who will come after and carry that hope forward, even if they never know the hands that held it first.

Campus ministry is not a niche corner of the church; it is the church. It is the place where faith is wrestled with honestly, where burdens are shared, where hope is built, where generations intersect in holy, unexpected ways.

We are stronger when we do this work together. These stones remind us: your prayers shape our students, and our students help carry your prayers into the world. Together, we are building something lasting— not just for this moment, but for the generations who will walk the paths after us.