See You at the Pole is a nationwide event where Christian students from all across America pray for the well-being of their schools. MVHS Roots Christian Club participated by gathering on the football field on Sept. 17 and doing several worship activities, including group sing-alongs and intensive small group discussions about various religious topics.

Senior Edwin Peng has been a part of Roots since his sophomore year. Peng remembers eating muffins with his friends at group breakfast as a good bonding moment, and he found it interesting to discuss why Christians can feel hesitant to show their faith at school.

“I’m a pretty liberal person.” Peng said. “I view Christianity more as, you do good things for other people to make them feel good because God doesn’t punish us for doing all this bad stuff, He forgives you.”

Peng appreciated the event overall because of the relatively large number of attendees and the unity shown amongst Christians.

“It was just a good experience for us to bond together and be unified because See You At The Pole, the event’s importance, is what drew out so many,” Peng said. “Usually there’s not that many people who are willing to pray together like that, so I thought that was pretty cool.”

Like Peng, sophomore Zachary Chow joined the club just this year. He remembered discussing how Christianity is demonstrated at school as well, and found the initial attitude of embarrassment towards Christianity to be a relatable moment.

“That’s kind of how I was for a while,” Chow said. “Until I started talking about it a little bit, how I wasn’t able to go [to church].”

Chow’s family has had a complicated relationship with the faith, and they decided not to attend church for a while in order to sort their thoughts out on religion and avoid unwanted fanaticism. Chow was unable to attend church until recently, when a friend offered to take him to their church instead. He chose not to speak about the situation for a while, but once he was in a like-minded group, he found it to be much easier to express his troubles and find a solution.

Chow thinks that parents may play a role in people’s hesitation to be openly Christian.

“Most of the other people that I know, their parents are not as forgiving or willing to have their children make their own decisions because they’re afraid of having them go down the wrong path,” Chow said. “They’re probably too preoccupied with other things like extracurriculars or school to even try to think of other things such as religion.”

Finally, Senior Samuel Suh has been a Christian since the very beginning, though he feels that he only really started believing in sixth grade. This was because of some of the difficulties that he was facing in life at the time.

“At the hardest time of my life when nothing seemed to be going right, when my family was falling apart, when I was falling apart . . . God really met me in every way that I needed to be met,” Suh said.

In the end, Suh enjoyed how people transformed over the course of See You At The Pole and began to worship openly.

“In the beginning, everyone was really scared to sing,” Suh said. “Yoanna was doing all the singing and then everyone was kind of whispering along with her because they’re all too scared to sing but by the end, it was good to see people losing some of their shame, not being afraid to praise God for who He is. I think that was the best part of it for me.”