Spiritual simplicity: Christian outreach ministry aims to help struggling college students

By Jessica Ravitz
The Salt Lake Tribune
06/14/2008

LAYTON - The caller said he had a gun to his head and was about to pull the trigger when Charles Freeman, then a college student and part-time disc jockey at a Seattle Christian music station, answered the phone.

He was able to talk the radio-station caller down and met with the troubled man to discuss "a better way." Even though the experience is now decades old, it stuck with Freeman, he said, serving as a reminder of how much people can hurt.

All these years later, the 53-year-old longtime public-affairs specialist at Hill Air Force Base is the brains behind a new nationwide venture aimed at helping those he believes struggle most: college students.

They "may think they have it all together," Freeman said, sitting in his Layton home office. "But after the party, after the drugs, after everything else, people still wonder in their time alone what more there is to life. . . . They're grappling with the big questions - where they're going in life, what they're supposed to do, what the meaning is beyond the degrees." the rest