An accounting senior who grew up in church says learning to share her faith at Sam Houston State changed how she sees her degree and her days.
Abby Sarraf is about six weeks from graduating from Sam Houston State University with a degree in accounting, and she has no job lined up. She has ideas, she has applications out, and she is praying about where God wants her to go. The 21-year-old senior said she is excited about how the Lord will use her degree next year, even though accounting itself was never the dream.
Sarraf grew up in a Christian home. Her parents brought her to church every week, and when she was around seven years old she told her mother she believed Jesus is real. She described it as a childlike faith, pure and certain. Her father baptized her when she was young, and she called that day sweet.
She understood more as she grew older, and in her freshman year of high school she realized belief alone was not changing how she lived. At a D-Now weekend led by Mikey, a leader at the church camp where she used to work, she told him she believed in Jesus but was not taking her faith seriously. She said she wanted to surrender fully and let him change her life.
A year later she was baptized again, not because she thought baptism saves a person, but because she wanted her youth group to see she was serious about her faith and to hold her accountable. She said she still had much growing to do, and that is part of the process.
A checkbox faith in high school
Sarraf said high school pulled her attention in other directions. She was focused on boys and relationships, pouring time into being liked and feeling loved, and she described herself as a people pleaser at heart. She wanted everyone to like her, and that constant effort left little room for seeking God.
She still read her Bible, often following a reading plan, and she said the Lord was good to give her that desire. The reading stayed a checkbox, though, something to mark off before going back to her phone and her social life. She said it consumed her time and made her miss much of what the Lord was doing.
She also felt confused about sharing the gospel. Youth conferences told her to tell her classmates about Jesus, and she agreed in the moment, but she said it went nowhere because she did not understand how to share it.
College changed that on day one. Sarraf showed up at the BSM, the campus ministry at Sam Houston State, and she said she never left. A student named Arianna asked if she wanted to do discipleship, and Sarraf agreed even though she did not know what the word meant. She soon learned it means studying the gospel, learning how to share it and learning how to teach it to others so they can share it too.
Discipleship with Arianna showed Sarraf what a Christlike community looks like. It was not only a Thursday gathering. Students saw each other during the week, in classes and around campus, keeping each other accountable and trying to share the gospel. Sarraf said things clicked once Arianna taught her how to share her faith, and she began telling classmates and people around her about it.
The shift came through the Red Book, a study guide used in BSM discipleship that asks questions about Bible passages. Sarraf said it changed her mindset from checking off a reading to letting the words transform her. Arianna paired toughness with love, calling Sarraf back when old high school tendencies returned, and Sarraf said she needed both.
Coming to college from a graduating class of 21 students made the change harder at first. Sarraf had a close circle of friends at her small school and never needed to look beyond it. At Sam Houston State, she said, there were so many people and so many new friends that the old pull toward boys and popularity came back. The BSM community helped her refocus, and she said it slowly became easier to desire God more than the approval of new friends.
A walk at Pritchett Field
Sarraf told a story from a recent Tuesday morning that she said shows how God works in ordinary moments. She woke up feeling like going for a walk, something she said she never does, and headed to the dirt track at Pritchett Field. She greeted an older woman on the track, and the two started walking laps together and talking.
The woman, Miss Deborah, had just moved to Huntsville and was trusting God with the move. She told Sarraf she had fallen in love with a man in Huntsville and was about to get married. When Sarraf said she had to leave, Deborah told her she believed the Lord had sent Sarraf to talk with her. Deborah had felt down that morning and had not wanted to walk, but she had prayed and gone anyway.
"I think the Lord sent you to talk to me," Deborah said, in Sarraf's words.
Sarraf said that was the reason she had wanted to walk that morning. She said God guides people in ways that can seem strange at the time, putting something on a heart and asking a person to be willing to act on it. Host Joshua Mahshi said God works in the ordinary in an extraordinary way, and a random walk can carry a purpose no one expects.
Her favorite Bible character right now is Abraham. She is reading through Genesis with her small group, and she said the story of Abraham taking his son to sacrifice him has hit her hard. She admires his faithfulness and his willingness to listen to God and give up what mattered to him. She said that stands against a culture that asks how to boost itself, whether in a career or in social life, and she wants what God has because she believes it is better.
She reads the New Testament more than the Old Testament because every time she reads about Jesus something new stands out. She is working through the Old Testament now with her small group, tracing the story from Adam to Jesus, and she said she keeps seeing how intentional God is. Her group studies the story of the Bible week by week, asking what each passage shows about God, and she said the answer keeps coming back to his intentionality.
Accounting, people and an eternal mindset
Sarraf said she has come to terms with not loving accounting, and that is fine with her because she loves people and she loves math. Her dream job would put her with a team, doing numbers and taxes for a company and doing life with the people around her. The work matters less to her than the chance to pour into coworkers.
She sees a parallel in the apostle Paul, who made tents to support himself while his real aim was ministry. She said her degree can work the same way, giving her a way to earn a living while she keeps sharing the gospel and serving people wherever she lands.
The lesson she takes from her time at the BSM is simple. Share the gospel, in words and in actions, because people need eternal life too. She described an eternal mindset, a sense that she already has eternal life and it is better than anything in this life, so the people around her need to hear about it.
"I have eternal life already and that is so much better than any of this," Sarraf said.
Without the BSM, she said, she might have graduated, become an accountant, made good money and lived an unfruitful life. She knows now that sharing the gospel matters wherever she goes, and she said it is a constant effort to stay locked in on that.
Her advice to freshmen is to get plugged in, get discipled, serve and then go out and share, teaching others so the pattern continues after college. She said it is easy to disappear in a large Thursday crowd, arriving for the message and leaving right away, but the growth comes from finding people in the community and staying connected.
Sarraf now disciples younger women herself, and she said each one looks different because people are different. Arianna met her with tough love, and Sarraf said she is more likely to meet her own disciples with a lighthearted approach, matching her personality to theirs. She believes God gives each person a personality that can reach people others cannot.
She was supposed to finish her degree in three years, and extra classes gave her one more semester. She told Chris, the BSM director, that she is grateful for it, because she has learned so much in the past two months alone. She said her closing encouragement is to follow whatever desire God has placed on a heart, whether toward a group of people or a way of serving, and to serve well in any way possible.
"I believe Jesus is real," Sarraf said, recalling the words she spoke to her mother at seven years old. She said the faith she has now is the same belief, carried further by a community that taught her to share it.
About Abby Sarraf
Abby Sarraf is a Sam Houston State University student featured in Students of the Kingdom, a series where college students talk about their walk with Jesus on a college campus. Watch the full episode with Sarraf on YouTube, and find more installments in the Students of the Kingdom series on hellohuntsvilletx.com.