“Hi! My name is Jake!” Those five words changed my life forever and started me on a path to being the Christian person I am today. See I was at DeSales University for a financial aid seminar. The idea was incoming freshmen could come to the school, answer a few questions and see if there were any in house scholarships they were eligible to receive.
We walked into one of the classrooms for our first session with a Theology professor. As the other students and myself sat down, the young man next to me turned around and with a huge smile looked at me and said: “Hi! My name is Jake” and stuck his hand out with a confidence I knew I didn’t possess.
See I was always a faithful Catholic, and I was an overall nice guy. The problem was at this point in time I lacked social skills. If you met me that day, I might have seemed like I was trying to shake you off, where as the reality was that I was probably actually terrified of you.
So when this young man said “Hi! My name is Jake” and stuck his hand out, I cautiously looked around to make sure he was talking to me, slowly took his hand and gingerly said: “Hi, I’m Nate.” After that we talked and discovered we were both incoming freshmen Theology majors and agreed we would have to try and connect on the first day of classes. Of course by the phrase “we talked” I mean, Jake suggested these things and I nodded my head in amazement that he was still happy to be talking to me.
Our conversation ended when the professor started his presentation, which while I enjoyed talking to Jake also gave me a sense of relief as I no longer had to figure out what to say to him. After the presentation, my parents and I left the classroom and were starting to walk over to the cafeteria for lunch when I heard a voice behind me yell “Nate! Wait up!” Sure enough, it was Jake, asking if we wanted to do lunch together to which I readily agreed. While on the way to the cafeteria Jake asked me one question that made us both sure we would be friends for a long time: “Nate, do you consider yourself just Catholic….or CATHOLIC!” I looked at him, gave him a smile for the first time and said “Dude, I’m so totally CATHOLIC!”
Since that time, Jake and I found accountability for our faith in each other. We learned the liturgy of the hours together, we kept each other’s prayer intentions close to our hearts, and we challenged each other to be the best we could be spiritually, physically, and personally.
Jake is one person in my life who helped me become the Catholic I am today. His friendship and accountability are what helped me be open to other people so that my faith was not just a faith between myself and Jesus but a faith that could love both God and neighbor. If he had not taken that first step to say “Hi” I don’t know where my faith would be today.
I suspect we all have a Jake in our lives that took the time to reach out to us and changed us. Since these people took the risk to say hello to us, and had the impact they did with that hello, how could we as Christians ever refuse the opportunity to say hello to someone? After all, you just might change their lives forever.