Taylor University’s annual Stand Up for Your Sibling event took place in the Rediger Auditorium on Feb. 6, giving students an opportunity to use their voice and help others feel understood and accepted.
“We hear year after year students say, ‘This is a really powerful experience for me to remember I'm not alone at Taylor,’” Julia Hurlow, associate vice president for student development and director of residence life, said.
She has been participating in and leading Stand Up for Your Sibling for several years and consistently sees students attend without needing additional advertisement. It encourages her to think that students are talking about the experience amongst themselves.
According to Hurlow, the event was originally called Stand Up for Your Sister and was started to raise mental health awareness among women nationally. Over time, it transitioned into the event it is now, so that both men and women can be participants.
She said that the current script of questions and biblical affirmations was written by students and has been used for the last 3 to 4 years. Discipleship coordinators and student leaders worked closely with Hurlow and graduate assistant Natalia Cusato to organize the event.
“[The event] creates a space of vulnerability,” said Kenna Selk, discipleship coordinator for Olson Hall. “And it creates space to have conversations that aren’t always had but need to be had.”
Selk first participated in this type of event when she went to one at Indiana Wesleyan University with a friend. During that time, Selk was able to bring some of her deep struggles to the surface that she had not told anyone about. This brought her a step closer to freedom from that burden, as she later brought it up to her mentor and other close people in her life.
“I think a lot of times the enemy wants to make us feel like we're alone,” she said. "Like, that's one of his biggest things, but when things are brought into the light, that's when the Lord is able to work in all that, and so it's been really cool to see that even with Stand Up for Your Sibling.”
The night took a turn as students experienced technical difficulties when they were filling out the survey on their phones. As attendees prepared to receive an email with a survey another person had filled out anonymously, they were instead met with blank inboxes.
The software that the event was using wasn’t collecting the emails, according to Micah Hardesty, a user services analyst at Taylor who was working with the others to try and solve the problem.
In the past, Taylor has had several technical glitches during Stand Up for Your Sibling events. Hardesty said the event used to do the surveys on paper but switched to electronics to make it quicker. She noted that the current software is a lot cleaner than what has been used in the past, but some settings needed to be adjusted pertaining specifically to confidentiality.
“That's, I think, where I didn't test it before,” she said.
Hurlow said they decided to push pause and have the students stand up during the prompts if they knew of someone in their life who had experienced it.
One of the students who attended was Daniel Bishop, a freshman who had heard about Stand Up for Your Sibling through his dorm’s all-hall meeting.
Bishop said that the technical issues did change the tone of the event. However, he noted that there was an interesting effect to taking the survey three times, because it encouraged him to choose the answers that really applied to his life.
Little conversations that took place because of what was happening were another part of the experience for him.
“I could sense a little bit of that we were all on the same page about the situation, which was kind of nice, and I think it did bring us more together as a community,” Bishop said.
After the Residence Life leaders had finished reading through the questions, they encouraged attendees to read prompts along with them that affirmed who their identity was in Christ. Hundreds of voices joined together to read words on the screen that had just a moment ago addressed a very different part of their story.
“I think that's an opportunity to live into what does the gospel say, and the participation of we're going to stand together each time in recognition and repeat this together as a collective unison,” Hurlow said.
