Meet Our Summer Youth Interns: Kate and Eric!

Kate May and Eric Mays are our Redeemer Youth Ministries summer 2021 interns. Kate has been connected with Redeemer since she was younger, and has been coming to Redeemer’s Youth Group since her sophomore year of high school. Eric has gotten connected with Redeemer in the past two years since his time as part of Guilford Christian Ministry (GCM). We're so thankful that the Lord has brought them to partner in life and ministry with us! They sat down with us to tell us a little bit more about themselves.

Where did you grow up? What was it like?

Eric: I was born and raised in Pamplico, South Carolina. Most people haven’t heard of it—it’s very small. It’s a tiny little speck on the map, but it's home. Growing up, my family and I would do a lot of fishing and swimming in the nearby ponds and rivers, riding 4-wheelers, and having bonfires. And I went to what you can probably imagine was a very small public school. We had about 350 people in my high school from like a 20 minute radius, but it was great.

Kate: I was born in the small town of Greensboro, North Carolina. I’m not sure if you’ve ever heard of it, laughs. I loved growing up in Greensboro because it felt like such a small community, but wasn’t in a teeny tiny town. My parents have lived here for 30+ years, so I felt like I knew everyone in Greensboro. I've been in the same church my whole life up until this point, and I went to a private Christian school, so that community was really small too. Greensboro is the kind of place where I go to Target and see somebody I know, I go to Harris Teeter and see somebody I know, I go to the pool and see 50 people I know—it feels like home.

What is/was your dream job?

Kate: I used to want to be a sportscaster. Getting to interview players on the field was my dream. I still would love to work for the Cowboys too, but my other dream as of recent is to run a camp--like Camp Booyah.

Eric: It used to be a professional football player, an archaeologist, or an astronaut. But now I want to be a high school history teacher.

What’s one fun fact about yourself, and, now that you’ve worked together for a little while, what’s one about the other person?

Kate: I have 27 first cousins. Eric’s hometown only has one chain restaurant, and that’s Domino’s.

Eric: I used to have this really cool scar from a pressure washer. “Perfect” is probably the single word Kate uses the most.

How did the Lord meet you?

Eric: I grew up in a Christian household--my family went to a Catholic church. As I got older, I started getting involved in Sunday school. And then I started going to youth groups with my friends from high school at our local Baptist churches where they went to church. But everybody in my town goes to church. So it’s just like a normal thing to do, and everyone would say, “Yeah, I'm a Christian.” You could do whatever you wanted, but you’d just go to church too. And so I was right on board with that all the way up until the summer going into my senior year of high school. One of the youth groups I was in went to a camp called SummerSalt. There was one talk throughout the week that really hit me--it was telling me everything I needed to hear. And that was the moment when my heart changed and I realized, “Jesus is somebody I really want to follow. It's not my family's faith. This is this is mine, too.” 

Kate: My parents are super in love with the Lord. It's awesome. And so I feel like I always had good people to look up to in my family. But I technically committed my life to Christ when I was four at VBS. I remember very plainly that I was on Team Lizard, and we were singing a song when they said, “If you want to come up and dedicate your life to Christ, then you can.” And so I did. When I was 10 didn't really mean a lot to me--as a kid I was like, “This is what I do. And this is what's good.” And no part of me felt pressured to do any of that, but I guess it really wasn't my own.

I met Melissa when I was in middle school at Grace Community Church, which is where I went, and they started me on the path of wanting to make it my own, but I still didn't really know. But when I was a freshman in high school, I went on a retreat with Caldwell. The man was preaching, and he was like, “I'm going to have you guys go outside and listen to what the Lord has to say. Because he's going to say something to you.” And I was like “Okay, great! Can't wait!” I’d never done this before. I'm 14 years old. And so I walked out into the field and laid on the ground. Radio silence. Nothing. And I was devastated. I came back in and was like, “What the heck? Do I even know God? Are we even friends?” While everyone else was like, “Wow, that was such a moving time.” So then I come home and I was crying to my dad about it, like, “I feel like I don't really know God. I feel like I don't even know what's going on.” He was like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, hold up. Let's take a few steps back here.” And he gave me The Blue Book by Jim Branch. And that's when I started doing Bible study on my own. Because there was that fear of not knowing God.

But throughout high school I would definitely say that I was a Christian, and I was also pinned as the good girI. I think that my faith had become a pride thing for me because I wanted to keep this vision that I was the girl who really knew God and that I was the kid that all the parents liked. I felt like I had all these expectations on me, so it was good for me to go away to college and figure out how I wanted to and was going to follow the Lord apart from those. I had a mentor in high school, Susie Fowler, who called us seniors together before we left for school, and she said, “What you do in the first two weeks of college is going to affect the rest of your college career. Not to say that the clubs you join or the major you choose will, but your habits are going to affect how you do the rest of college. So I got to school and frantically said, “Where’s my Bible? Let’s do this.” So I started reading and praying a lot more. So the Lord met me at a young age and has really been working on me for a long time, and still is.

Can you tell us about your college experience?

Kate: I go to Appalachian State University and I just finished my junior yearI. I love my school, but I originally did not want to go there at all. My parents went there and my sister went there, and the last thing that I wanted to do was to just follow somebody else. I was going to go to Liberty University in Virginia. I had a deposit down and was ready to go. Then during Christmas break of my senior year I sat down with my dad and I realized that I was going to Liberty just because it seemed like the right thing to do. I had gone to Christian school my whole life, and when I visited Liberty, I loved it. But I realized that if I went there that I wouldn't push myself in my faith at all because it was already built into the structure of everything, and that just wasn’t what I needed.

Eric: I just finished my sophomore year at Guilford College here in Greensboro. I came in wanting to be a forensic biologist, but I saw some crazy things on a ride-along towards the beginning of school, and decided I wanted to be able to make an impact on people in a different way than I could if I did that job. So now I’m studying to be a high school history teacher. I knew I wanted to play football in college. I had never heard of Guilford prior to a visit from one of the coaches, and once I visited campus, I loved it. So I went to Guilford and started playing football--that means you show up early before the semester begins for football camp. So I was getting to know the area and Judson came a few days in. He started telling us about Guilford Christian Ministry (GCM) and how he’s our campus minister and on staff at Church of the Redeemer. Right after he talked I went up to him and said, “Judson, hi! I’m Eric.” And that’s what began our friendship and me getting plugged into GCM and Redeemer. I've loved the decision thus far to go to Guilford mainly because of the people that I've met, their impact on me, and their impact on my faith as well.

So what will you guys be up to as the summer youth interns?

Eric: We’ve got our fun summer kickoff, Camp Booyah…

Kate: You’re in teams for camp, and there's a service element. In the mornings, you're doing the service project with your team. In the afternoon it’s activities time with your team. We have field games, free time, a ropes course, a trampoline of some sort in the water, a zip line--there's just lots of stuff to do. And then after dinner there’s a message given and then we play a big game. We do a talent show, too!

Besides that, during the summer we’ll just do a lot of hanging out. We have WAHO (Wednesday Afternoon Hang Out). We’ll be taking some trips to the whitewater center in Charlotte, going tubing, going to Boone… All of the high school girls will come sleep in my pink living room, and I’m so excited. We also have high school Bible study every Sunday night at Melissa’s house.

What are you looking forward to about it?

Eric: I’m looking forward to the way that the Lord is going to work differently through different people.

Kate: I’m excited to get to know these high school girls who I’ve known since middle school in deeper ways, create friendships with them that will be long-lasting, and be like a mentor to them.

Do you think you’ll continue to be in ministry during your lives?

Kate: I never thought that I would want to do ministry. I did YoungLife and WyldLife, but during that I had just one or two girls that I was pouring into and not a big community of kids. But after watching Melissa be who she is and running this ministry, I’ve thought “I definitely could want to do that.” Potentially. 

Eric: Ministry has been something i’ve been thinking about doing for the past 2 years, but that was the extent of my understanding of my call to ministry.  I always figured maybe the Lord would open the door, if it was something I was really called to be doing. So this internship this summer is almost like a ministry ridealong for me.

Kate: Or I might just be involved with youth ministry in whatever capacity while I’m working whatever other job I’m in. I would love to one day own my own house and be an adult leader for YoungLife and have kids have a place where they can come and be, because I had that in high school and it was really sweet to be able to go to people's houses. I want that open-door invite for my house.

Eric: It makes me think of the core idea behind the Jubilee Conference we participate in: bringing God into every square inch of our lives. So anything you do can be ministry.

Is there anything since you’ve started as summer interns which the Lord has been showing you?

Kate: The importance of intergenerational ministry. The times I’ve been able to spend with Melissa and Randy have been so important to me. Or like when I went to Drew’s son’s Hutch’s birthday party--there was a four year old, a sixth grader, a high schooler, me as a college kid, and some post-college people and adults, too. I've never realized how important it is to be friends with people who are not your age and just have that influence in your life.

Eric: I’ve seen that the Lord can move in all shapes and sizes. And you don't need a large crowd of people for the Lord to show up. We were trying to get a bunch of high school guys to come out for this big event, but only 2 guys showed up. But it was cool to sit back and realize it was okay that there was only 2 people, and I really enjoyed my time with them. So it’s been good to reflect on my role and say, “I can try to do this and that but whatever situation that the Lord unravels—just go with it and just be there.