Grace

In the spring of 1999, eighteen-year-old Morgan Haas, a first-year college student at the University of the Great Lakes in Michigan, was on her way to East Tennessee’s Smoky Mountains for a week-long retreat. She was attending along with other students from her large state university, who were members of a student organization called Christian Kingdom.

Christian Kingdom was an evangelical campus ministry with chapters at colleges and universities around the world. The retreat, dubbed Infinity, would be held at Honeycutt Estate, a rural compound in the mountains. The estate boasted sparkling lakes and streams, luscious forests, and exciting opportunities to fish, horseback ride, and swim.

Morgan was told stories from upperclassmen about how Infinity was amazing and changed their lives. They waxed poetic about the ways in which they could “meet” God on the retreat, such as stripped-down, moving praise and worship time, the moments of solitude while reading the Bible, and the calming silence of reflection and meditation on the wonderful cross. So, she was stoked by the tales she heard and was looking forward to making memories of her own.

She was also hoping that the retreat would mend her broken heart. Mere months before the trip, her high school sweetheart, Luke Phillips, who was now attending Great Lakes along with her and was also in Christian Kingdom, abruptly ended their relationship. The breakup was at the behest of Luke’s parents, who felt that Morgan believed in the wrong type of Christianity, was of the wrong background, and was therefore wrong for him.

Morgan’s hope in attending the retreat was to have an opportunity to lean into her faith in God with other believers from her university. Yet Infinity was where she would find that perhaps, God was not for her.