Kristin Young (current MDiv student) can trace her pull to seminary back to when her kids were young. She had enrolled in a certificate program where she could study apologetics, which had always interested her, but with six kids at home and a couple of go-at-your-own-pace modules under her belt, she decided it wasn’t her season and shelved seminary for a later time.
But when her 13-year-old son was diagnosed with brain cancer, it was the responses of others that brought what she calls “the rumbling” back to her spirit. “When Colby got sick, people said some crazy stuff to us that I know is not in my Bible,” Kristin recalls. “I wanted to go back and pursue apologetics to help people understand what they believe and why they believe it.” She knew she wasn’t called to church or pastoral ministry, but, she says, “to be able to teach and to write—that has always been something that’s interested me.”
So, after her son’s first round of chemotherapy and with hopes for remission, she applied to a local seminary. But within a month of her studies, Colby experienced a relapse, then entered a clinical trial, and seminary went back on the shelf.
“We knew going in that the clinical trial was not going to cure him,” she says, “but perhaps it would prolong his life.” Their focus turned toward preparing their son for heaven and their other children for the impending loss and grief. Colby had a bucket list of things he wanted to do. “So we hit the list with a vengeance,” Kristin says. “And we took pictures.”
Chantelle Gibbs is Fuller’s senior events producer
Karley Carrillo is a creative content producer for Christian Assembly Church in Los Angeles and a freelance photographer. See more of her work at itsmekarley.com.
Kristin Young (current MDiv student) can trace her pull to seminary back to when her kids were young. She had enrolled in a certificate program where she could study apologetics, which had always interested her, but with six kids at home and a couple of go-at-your-own-pace modules under her belt, she decided it wasn’t her season and shelved seminary for a later time.
But when her 13-year-old son was diagnosed with brain cancer, it was the responses of others that brought what she calls “the rumbling” back to her spirit. “When Colby got sick, people said some crazy stuff to us that I know is not in my Bible,” Kristin recalls. “I wanted to go back and pursue apologetics to help people understand what they believe and why they believe it.” She knew she wasn’t called to church or pastoral ministry, but, she says, “to be able to teach and to write—that has always been something that’s interested me.”
So, after her son’s first round of chemotherapy and with hopes for remission, she applied to a local seminary. But within a month of her studies, Colby experienced a relapse, then entered a clinical trial, and seminary went back on the shelf.
“We knew going in that the clinical trial was not going to cure him,” she says, “but perhaps it would prolong his life.” Their focus turned toward preparing their son for heaven and their other children for the impending loss and grief. Colby had a bucket list of things he wanted to do. “So we hit the list with a vengeance,” Kristin says. “And we took pictures.”
Chantelle Gibbs is Fuller’s senior events producer
Karley Carrillo is a creative content producer for Christian Assembly Church in Los Angeles and a freelance photographer. See more of her work at itsmekarley.com.
Kristin had first gotten into photography when Colby was born and had since developed a thriving photography business. When she began taking pictures as he battled cancer, they thought he was going to beat it. At the time, she thought, “I’ll take pictures of the journey because these pictures are going to say how far you’ve come, what God has got you through.” She also started writing, as another way to process her grief, which came naturally alongside the photo documentation. Later on, however, she remembers thinking, “I need to document every piece of my son because he is not going to be here.”
Rather than turning away or growing disenchanted with Jesus, a desire to understand it all led her to lean into Jesus more. “Where is Colby going? What is it going to be like? What does that mean for me, for my family? What does it mean for what I believe, and how am I going to live this out?” Kristin recalls the questions she ruminated on at the time. “I needed to know more,” she says. “I needed to know more and more. And then, I ended up in seminary.”
After a valiant two-year fight, Colby passed away at the age of 15. But even then, Kristin remembers living in hope, more reassured that God is in the valley. Upon her return to seminary, she arrived “gung-ho to help believers understand what the Bible says and how to walk through valleys and hope.”
About a year into her program, Kristin was visiting Israel with two friends who happened to be graduates of Fuller. She confided in them about her disappointment with her seminary experience so far. At the seminary she was attending, Kristin had no professors who looked like her, “either as a woman or as an African American or as any person of color. And for me, there was a tragedy in that.” National events and local politics had permeated the classrooms, but she was hearing professors say things she couldn’t agree with. She wondered if this was the way she was supposed to experience seminary.
Her Fuller-alum friends were the first to say it. “You need to apply to Fuller. It’s gonna check a whole bunch of boxes while you’re learning: having people who look like you, learning from a breadth and a depth of people, learning things that you may not agree with but you still gotta wade through it and not be scared of the slippery slope.”
So when Kristin returned home from Israel, she decided to apply to Fuller.
She transferred in as an online student and immediately clicked with a classmate during her first quarter. They started following each other on Instagram and have now been each other’s champions online and in real life, particularly in the Hebrew class they were taking together. Kristin reflects on how those first integrative classes were formatted in such a way as to build community and connection with familiar faces turned friends. “Having that community with my friend has made online learning palatable; it’s made it feel less lonely. I can text her and ask, ‘How are we doing this week?’ These are my people.”
Before she started studying at Fuller, Kristin thought she had to make a choice between her creative pursuits and her theological ones. Either she would work in the creative space with her photography business, or it would have to go on the back burner if she was going to pursue teaching or apologetics. This was how it had to be—or so she thought. But then she took a Theology and Culture class at Fuller, which got her thinking, and by the time she finished her Theology and Art course, it was “the nail in the coffin” for that false belief. “I don’t have to choose,” she knows now. “I refuse to choose.”
Today, Kristin combines her enjoyment of writing and her heart for vulnerability by speaking and presenting publicly on her story and journey with Colby. While her intention to share her raw thoughts, prayers, and photos on her online blog and her Instagram did not begin as a means to help others, her platform has gained traction, and she’s glad it has helped many. “I do use a lot of the photos with him that I took from our cancer valley, and I put words with them, and it’s powerful! Sometimes I have to stop and check to make sure people in the room are okay. Colby got cancer. God knew Colby was gonna get cancer. And God was able to use—and is continuing to use—it in a mighty way.”
Initially transferring in as an MA in Theology student, after the first couple of quarters, she decided she wanted to do the Master of Divinity (MDiv) because she wanted to teach. “Just like the church, there’s no perfect seminary. But for the way I want to learn and teach, Fuller has felt a lot more freeing to do that.”
Even before Kristin began her seminary studies, she was of the camp that she needed to fit everything into their perfectly siloed sections, including theology. Sitting in class her first quarter at Fuller, Kristin recalls having a “crisis of the soul” because, rather than being told what she should think, she was presented with the space to research and process her own thoughts. “To me, it was refreshing because it meant that there are no rectangular tables with somebody sitting at the head and someone saying this is how we should interpret this.”
Kristin hopes to incorporate this into her own ethos and mindset when she begins to teach. “What I would love to do as a professor is to sit at a round table and to have everyone pull up a chair. And everyone’s pulling up the same chair; nobody’s in a lawn chair and nobody’s in a high chair. We are all in this. What does the text say to you? What can I learn from you that I’m not getting because that’s not my experience? That’s what theology is about. How are we all experiencing God?”
In reflecting on her road to seminary, Kristin says, “It was peppered with a lot of sadness. But also goodness. I originally thought seminary was a way for me to process what I believe to be true, to understand what I believe to be true, and to help other people. But what seminary has become is a confidence in myself and how God shows up in me, how God shows up in my life, and how God shows up in my experiences.”
As for what subjects to teach, her burning heart’s desire is to teach theology and culture, and to weave in the lessons she’s learned and is learning through her own photography and writing. As a creative, Kristin maintains her own discipline of regularly embarking on personal projects.
One project she is currently working on came about when she was admiring the light in her home one day. She noticed the light in her bedroom, which was completely dark except for a strip of light cascading over her crumpled sheets. Normally, it wasn’t a setting conducive to taking a photo because of the lack of light. As someone who shoots primarily on film, she knew even with the best of exposure settings, everything would likely end up pitch black. But as she wrestled with it, she decided to get her camera out anyway. “Kristin, there’s just enough,” she said to herself.
“In photography, you usually want to shoot for the light. But I’m trying to shoot for the dark. Because all it takes is a little bit of light to break up the darkness.”
She laughs, admitting the project is not a fully developed creative idea and might only go as far as the one photo she grabbed that day. “It could stop and end this week,” she says. “Or I could keep it going, trying to find light in the darkness.”
Drawing from her own journey of growing into her faith and vocation, Rachel Lingle (MSMFT ’17) practices empathy and presence as she sits with clients in the therapy room.
