Do you have anybody in your life that you’d like to sit down and ask what they really thought of you for the first 4 years they knew you? I wouldn’t even have to think about the answer to that question.
Hugh Jones.
I’d love to get the unfiltered look at what Hugh thought of me during my college years. See, he was the Campus Crusade for Christ director at UNC during my time there.
And when I look back on college, I shake my head with awkward eyes downcast.
I’m gonna share a secret with you that more than qualifies me for some type of Christianese wall of shame: my email address in college was WWJD4evr@email.unc.edu.
Go back and read that again. Roll around in it.
The worst part was that I didn’t get the terrible, terrible cheesiness of it until after college. I used that email address proudly for nearly half of a decade.
So yeah, I’d like to sit over coffee and hear what Hugh Jones really thought of me. Because I was captain Crusader for sure.
Hugh deserves some type of medal for leading the movement that would successfully take a kid who (before day one of class, freshman year) would choose that cheese-tastic email and turning him into someone who could actually be fruitful in ministry. And he did all of it without offending me.
I’ve heard Hugh called “the velvet hammer” because he can tell you that you are the worst sinner on the planet, deserving of hellfire and damnation, and do it in such a way that you want him to say it again, once he’s finished. He’s a conversational artist, and you always leave from talking with him feeling like a better person for having talked.
The secret, I think, is that you feel valued by him. He goes out of his way to know you, in conversation. In that way, he’s far different than most people, especially me. I’ve never really heard him talk about himself. He’s constantly asking questions.
So he gets a shout-out, today. He’s moved on from being director at UNC since I left, and now heads up a ministry within Campus Crusade for Christ that specifically targets international students living and studying here in the US. A better investment in the lives of students would be tough to find. Click here to support Hugh and Julie Jones.