For years, I thought joy just meant filling my life with the right people & things- soccer, music, my friends. Then I began to see how thin that kind of joy really was; a lesson God drove home more deeply than ever the summer I held my best friend as his heart stopped, right there in my arms. I’m CSPC Associate Director of High School Ministry Caleb Causey, and this is how God’s teaching me to live deeply. 

“I grew up in North Knoxville, in a family that didn’t just believe in God- we built our whole life around him. My granddad pastored the church I was raised in, Berean, and started the school I was homeschooled into. I came to faith around age nine, but for a long time Jesus stayed in the background. My life was really centered on soccer -I played club ball for a team here in town- and music. Good things. Just not durable ones. I found out the difference in high school, at a retreat, listening to a friend stand up and tell her story. Her life had been a lot harder than mine, and she talked about Jesus being enough for her in the middle of it. She really meant it, in a way I could see on her face. I remember sitting there thinking, ‘That is not how I relate to him.’ I wouldn’t say that was the moment I became a Christian. I already believed. But it was the moment I realized I needed a more durable joy to become the center of my life- the joy that only Jesus gives. Then 2020 happened. I graduated high school straight into COVID, and for someone as extroverted as I am, isolation felt like my whole world ending. Friends scattered to colleges I couldn’t afford. I stayed home and started community college. Everything was online- nothing like the freshman year I’d pictured, not one piece of it. I remember half-joking prayers that I’d love to just leave the country and go somewhere, anywhere. Instead, a friend invited me to spend the summer counseling at a little Bible camp north of Nashville, in a town called Adams. I said yes mostly because I had nothing else going on. But that camp turned out to be one of the most important places I’d ever spend time. It was also where I experienced the most shocking, traumatic day of my life.

By my second summer at Coldstream Christian Camp, the place felt like home. One of my closest friends at the time, Thomas Arsenault, had gotten me involved in the first place. His fiancée Claire’s family basically ran it. We were working High School Week: pointing teenagers toward Jesus by day, laughing with our best friends by night. After a year as lonely as 2020 had been, it felt like getting my whole life handed back to me. Then one afternoon, without any warning at all, the bottom fell out. Thomas collapsed. I wasn’t standing next to him, but I was close, and I was there within moments; one of the first on the scene. I couldn’t perform CPR myself, so I was handed a different job: Hold a mask over his face and pump air into his lungs, while the people around me fought to get his heart beating again. I held Thomas’s head in my lap. Claire was right there, understandably hysterical. And from where I knelt, watching the color drain out of my best friend’s face under my own hands, I could see Thomas dying. Not ‘seemed to’ or ‘we were scared he might.’ I was certain my friend had died in my arms. Paramedics eventually got there and took him away. And in the chaos of that day -some people’s faces beat red from sobbing, other campers staring aimlessly with shellshock, and staffers placing frantic calls to Thomas’s family- nobody corrected what I thought had happened. Not for hours. Maybe not until the next day. It wasn’t anyone’s fault- that was just how it worked out. So for a long stretch of time that’s still a blur, I lived as a person whose best friend had just died in front of him, on a gravel path I now can’t walk past without seeing it all over again.

But Thomas didn’t die. His heart started again in the ambulance, and he spent the next two weeks in the ICU. I should have felt nothing but relief, and part of me did. But my body couldn’t catch up to the news. I had watched him die. I had held him while it happened. That was the reality I’d experienced. I couldn’t just un-feel that or hit delete and input corrected information. For months, I felt like I was simultaneously living in two different worlds: one where my friend had died, one where he was alive and eventually calling me on the phone (and changed, matured -as anyone would be- by the crisis he’d been through). Somehow, both felt completely true at the same time. I’d tell people the story and watch their faces fall at ‘he died,’ then lift with relief at ‘but he came back.’ But I could never quite get to the relief part myself. I hadn’t lost a friend, technically. So what was I even grieving? One of the truest things I remember from that week wasn’t anything anyone said to comfort me. It was watching Claire’s dad kneel beside her in the middle of the chaos and walk her through the catechism – ‘What is your only hope in life and death?’- because the things we’d memorized on ordinary Sunday mornings turned out to be the only things sturdy enough to hold on to that day. The year after was slow. Honestly, I didn’t have a great model for grieving well going in. I’m thankful for my God-fearing family, but processing my emotions healthily wasn’t something I was set up for success in growing up (and certainly not for something traumatic like this). So I leaned on people who could teach me. A mentor named Mark Little, who’d coached and taught me in high school, met with me consistently all through college and mostly just listened. I sat in Christian counseling for PTSD for six months. There was no single breakthrough moment- no lightning bolt that left me saying ‘Aha.’ It was slower than that: a weekly lunch, a biweekly counseling appointment. Brick by brick, until the two halves of the story finally started feeling more like one story. And I got to be there for the joyful conclusion- lumpy throat, full heart and all as I watched Thomas kiss his bride.

I can see the Lord’s hand through that whole disorienting season- drawing me to himself less through any single answer and more through people who simply wouldn’t leave. A mentor who showed up every week for years. A counselor who helped me name what I felt when I had no language for it. A church family that taught me how to grieve and hope in the same breath, because we’re not a people who grieve without hope. God was the same God in the worst afternoon of my life as he is right now, in one of the best times of my life. That hard season is also part of how I ended up here at CSPC. I finished at UT still not sure what I’d do with my degree- Advertising didn’t seem like the right path anymore given all I’d been going through. I had become part of RUF and also had gotten plugged into a local church, Fellowship North, where I found myself falling into student ministry almost before I noticed it happening. I was leading worship for high schoolers on Wednesday nights, watching my own faith get steadier as I tried to help build theirs. That led to a two-year residency at Second Presbyterian in Memphis, where I learned so much more about what it looks like to really shepherd students. I loved it. But home kept pulling at me, and this past summer I joined CSPC as Associate Director of High School Ministry. The young adult community here embraced me fast. And getting to know these students -our future elders, deacons, missionaries, and parents- has been some of the most fun I’ve ever had. I don’t think I’d be in this exact seat without that awful day on the gravel at Coldstream Christian Camp: without nearly losing one of my best friends, without a mentor’s quiet consistency, without a church that taught me how to hold grief and hope at once. Ministry to students, for me, is an extension of exactly that: showing up for people again and again, pointing them to a God who doesn’t change, no matter which world they’re standing in. He’s the God for this moment, same as he was for that one. I want to serve CSPC by helping the next generation know that truth- before the time comes when they’ll need to lean on it.”