Kicking off the Year

Classes start to day at Cornell. We kicked things off in a big way yesterday with the annual Christian Fellowship fair BBQ. At this event we join with all of the other evangelical campus ministry groups to host a large outdoor picnic event. Each ministry sets up a table and we serve tons of free hamburgers and hot dogs to students who are walking by.
The main point of this is to give new students the opportunity to connect with the Body of Christ on campus. That is why for the past two years we’ve hosted this event in a prime location up on North Campus where all of the freshman live. The second reason is to have fun! Our hope is that this event brings a sense of fun and community to the opening week of school.

Though not every student readily admits it, I think the first weeks of school here are pretty overwhelming. Most students show up here not really knowing anyone. It’s not like a typical state school where you see people whom you at least recognize from your high school or some state wide athletic event. Cornell students are from all over the world, so adjustment here is hard and community is not a plentiful commodity.
I’d estimate that we fed around 600 students. It’s pretty hard to get an accurate count, but we consumed 740 pieces of meat! We ran out, so if we had more we probably could have fed even more, but overall it was a great turnout.

The weather was amazing, and we were praising God for that! The past few days before, a lot of opening week activities were being canceled or seriously hampered by the rain! We were praying for clear skies and sun, and the Lord gave us a dry day!

Our older students were able to meet and get to know a lot of freshman and hopefully they can connect them with our small groups.

On another note……Last year I built some cornhole tables. Cornhole is a game that’s basically like Horse shoes or Ladder ball –it’s one of those games you can play in your yard with one hand while holding a drink in your other hand. It’s not hard, so it’s great for getting to know people. Cornhole is basically a bean bag toss and the bags are filled with feed corn. The game is super popular out in the mid-west for sure, but it does not really want to fly out here! We’ve been hauling our tables to events for the past couple of years, and it seems like our kids are the only ones who are getting into it! It’s a riot. But yesterday –at the very end of the time –there were 6 or so students playing corn-hole! It was great and I thanked them for putting our boards to use for once!

Here's a funny video about the game of Cornhole.