The Pepperdine RISE Program created an ambiance of intimate Christ-centered conversation during the 2024 RISE Summit. This year’s summit consisted of lunch and dinner sessions with a panel of Seaver RISE students, who shared their journeys of resilience and faith.
RISE, short for Resilience-Informed Skills Education, strives to help students strengthen the six dimensions: social, spiritual, physical, life skills, cognitive and service, according to their website. This education is aimed to “provide students with frameworks that can be used to navigate life’s difficulties,” according to their website.
“I took a first-year seminar class on resilience, and it was helpful for me, and the more that I worked at RISE, the more this just really struck deep,” junior Emily Luong said. “These are skills that I feel like not only students need to know but everyone in life. They are so applicable.”
The program hosts many different events aimed at empowering students and their lives such as one-on-one RISE coaching and RISE and Rest Yoga.
Held annually, the RISE Summit strives to connect the Pepperdine community and teach the different dimensions of RISE resilience, according to their website. This year’s conference focused on spiritual resilience through the theme “Rooted.”
“This year’s theme was influenced by the idea of what helps us stay rooted in terms of our faith,” Luong said. “Throughout the panelists’ stories, there was a common theme of how our faith and scripture allow us to stay rooted in who we are and helped us get through those struggling times.”
The summit featured a panel of five Seaver students and members of the RISE program, who each shared their personal stories of pain and how their faith produced resilience. The topics ranged from mental illness to experiencing ethnic discrimination.
“I really resonated when the panelists talked about the difficulties in their lives and how everyone needs a solid community to discuss their problems, next steps and get some support,” first-year Kianna Kotas said.
The summit also featured keynote speaker Dr. Deanna A. Thompson. Thompson introduced the summit with her book “Glimpsing Resurrection: Cancer, Trauma, and Ministry,” which explores the intersection of deep sadness associated with chronic illnesses and the practice of faithful lament.
“All of us have to deal with deep sadness in our lives, and if we don’t make space for those sadnesses, it becomes really hard actually to get to joy and resilience,” Thompson said. “Our faith traditions encourage us to make space for our sorrows and our sadness through lament.”
The summit closed with a raffle giveaway of a digital camera, a massage therapist gift card, a guided Bible and more. The objective of these items was for the recipients to use them to grow their spiritual resilience and remain rooted in their spiritual practice.
Both the RISE Program and 2024 Summit encourage the idea of community and how students should lean on their spiritual communities when tackling life’s challenges, according to their website.
“What is so important about lament is that, absolutely, we should feel that we can lament with ourselves, but one of the practices in the Book of Psalms is laments, [which] were hymns that were meant to be sung and read aloud in communal practice,” Thompson said. “We are encouraged to give voice to our own and other peoples’ sorrows.”
___________________
Follow the Graphic on X: @PeppGraphic
Contact Shalom Montgomery via email: shalom.montgomery@pepperdine.edu
