EDITOR'S NOTE: This story was published originally in the February issue of GCU Magazine, available in the purple bins on campus or digitally.
Story by Mike Kilen, Lana Sweeten-Shults, Mark Gonzales, Izabela Fogarasi and Paul Coro
When Aude Treilhou left everyone she knew in her home country of France to study at Grand Canyon University, it was never her plan to become Christian.
Same for Rylee LeMay, who didn’t know Jesus.
Jagaar Halverson saw all the signs that faith wasn’t for him before becoming a student, and women’s soccer player Addie Vali couldn’t have navigated her cancer diagnosis without the kind of faith that pervades campus.
They all came to GCU, where fellow students opened doors and invited them to Chapel. Where the campus community asked them to be guests at their churches and prayed over them. Where everyone seemed happy.
Treilhou, LeMay, Halverson and Vali found kindness, joy, compassion – as did others in this story.
But most importantly, they found their faith.
Searching for something
Even before stepping onto campus, idyllic as it was, Rylee LeMay was looking for something, “whether I realized it or not,” she said.
The elementary education junior knew she was going to college – her parents insisted. The plan was California, to avoid out-of-state tuition.
But then a GCU admissions counselor dropped into her high school. LeMay didn’t know what it was, but looking at brochures, she felt, in her gut, she needed to be here.
“That was one of those moments I had that I was so sure about that I’d never had before,” she said, even though GCU was a Christian university, and she was not Christian.
“I never grew up in the church. I was asked who Jesus was by someone who knew all of that, and I was, ‘Oh, I’ve never heard that name before.’
“… I had no idea before coming here. … It was never really taught in the family, by no one in my family,” she said, though her paternal grandparents were regular churchgoers and her nonpracticing Catholic parents reminded her she went to Christian summer camp.
She thinks she chose a Christian university because she didn’t want the classic college party experience. Soured by family addiction issues, she wanted to be someplace where she felt safe.
“I was always worried about going to college just because of, ‘Oh yeah! I’ll have the college experience, and it’s drinking and all that.”
She thought she wouldn’t find friends because she wasn’t a party girl.
But she came to GCU and saw how nice everyone was. “Everyone held the door open for each other,” LeMay said. “I thought, ‘Oh my gosh. This is kind of nice.’ … People will just sit down with you and say, ‘Tell me your story.’ I was like, ‘I just met you 10 minutes ago,’” she said with a laugh. “I love that.”
It was her roommate her freshman year who invited her to Chapel.
“I ended up being the one going every week,” she said, then another friend invited her to North Phoenix Church, where she joined the children’s ministry.
The girl who didn’t know about Jesus now was teaching children about Him.
And her faith isn’t flourishing just there but in her tour guide job.
“At the ARC (Antelope Reception Center), when we’re getting ready to meet the families, we pray for them before they come in. And I had never even known what that was.
“But listening to co-workers or my boss, and they were just like, ‘We pray for these families and that they get here safe.’ … We just love everyone. It’s so different,” said LeMay, who sees ministry opportunities “in every aspect of every day here,” even while leading tours down Lopes Way.
“There’s a different mindset and a sense of purpose here.”
GCU, “It changed everything for me. … I always was searching for something … and looking back now, that (faith, purpose, community) is totally what it was.”
– Lana Sweeten-Shults
His God moment
His grandparents prayed for him to follow their deep Christian faith. One year, they gave Jagaar Halverson a Bible. He thought, “What a dumb present; I won’t ever read this.”
He didn’t need all that. He had a contented, untroubled youth in rural Spencer, Iowa, where his parents were holiday-only churchgoers.
But something nagged at him – that Bible and why so many believed in so many different religions.
So, on a whim, he went to church with his grandparents; COVID shut it down three weeks later. That was his first sign. Then an email to the church’s pastor went unanswered: his second sign. Around the same time, South American missionaries he followed on YouTube announced they had become nonbelievers.
“That was sign number three that faith was not for me,” Halverson said.
As a high school page for Iowa House Majority Leader Matt Windschitl, he decided to serve through politics – and maybe spread his wings at college, somewhere he could have fun.
Halverson had heard of GCU. While it didn’t have a party reputation, at least he could join student government.
He filled out an application for the Associated Students of GCU Freshman Class Council but lost it. Again, it wasn’t meant to be.
But he awoke in the middle of the night with a start and filled it out again.
What he called that first “God moment” led to his time on the council, whose members asked him to join them at student-led worship night The Gathering. He heard powerful testimony about Jarod Lovekamp, a GCU student who tragically died on a camping trip. His story inspired Kamp Love, which leads college students to the Gospel through camping.
He also heard that night that the Lord has a plan for us.
“I wanted to experience what my friends were experiencing. If everyone is able to give their life to the Lord and have this radical transformation, that is incredible,” he said.
Then he did something that changed his relationship with the Lord. He and a friend read the Gospel of Luke for 24 days leading up to Christmas, so by Christmas morning, they would know the story of Jesus.
Halverson was baptized during his time at GCU.
“Once giving my life to the Lord, you start to know what community looks like. It made me want to serve more, in my community and at school,” he said, adding how he didn’t need drinking or dating. “All I needed was to grow my faith.”
He and others started a men’s Bible study that sometimes lasted until 1 a.m., and he was elected student body president the next year, basing his campaign on the Bible, which he once didn’t understand.
Halverson, who graduated in 2024 and worked for a U.S. congressman, moved to Washington, D.C., last summer with his wife, Caitlin, also a GCU grad. He’s working on a master’s at Pepperdine School of Public Policy. He wants to bring the morals and ethics embedded at GCU to what many see as a corrupt enterprise.
“I would not be the same person without the Lord and without GCU,” he said. “I found my wife at GCU. I found my best friends. I found, ultimately, the Lord.”
– Mike Kilen
Her miracle
Aude Treilhou shouldn’t be here.
The premed student was sick for much of her teen years, suffered from an intestinal condition doctors said she wouldn’t survive.
“After three years, they told my mom, ‘She has two weeks, so you can say goodbye. Make sure everything is (taken care of),’” Treilhou said.
But a miracle happened.
“It was something I was not supposed to be healed from,” she said.
That struggle gave her direction. Having spent so much time in hospitals, she wanted to become a doctor. “I saw a lot of kids who were scared and going to the doctor. I wanted to change that,” she said.
So she moved from France to GCU, a university she never had heard of until a friend of hers told her his cousin was a student there.
That it was a Christian university didn’t matter much to her.
“My dad is a complete atheist and my mom is agnostic. So it definitely was not the plan for me to become Christian,” said Treilhou, who remembers her awful first night on campus.
She was in a new school, a new country, and had just learned to speak English.
“But there was one girl that just prayed over me and talked to me about Jesus. Before I came to GCU, I heard little about that. The thing is, we don’t hear the right stories, I guess – back in France, at least.”
It was the first time anyone prayed over her; it was overwhelming.
Treilhou pushed through that first night then applied and became a resident assistant.
That’s when she met her co-resident assistant, “a great follower of Jesus,” who brought Treilhou to her church.
She and her resident director, “They just talked to me about it (their beliefs),” she said, and thinking back to that miracle in her life, what they said resonated with her. “… The story of Jesus made sense.”
Knowing there was someone greater than her, her doctors, her illness? It changed her outlook. And finding GCU, where she heard the right stories about Jesus, did the same.
Treilhou, once an atheist, attends Chapel every week. Once overwhelmed, she has found peace.
She credits those around her with helping her find faith.
“I’ve met a lot of people here whose faith was a really strong part of their life,” she said, adding with a smile, “We know GCU students – they’re all about Jesus.”
– Lana Sweeten-Shults
A life-changing prayer
Jaden Orsborn didn’t know how drastically his life would change at the Chaparral Hall pool.
When the psychology major came to GCU, all he was looking for was “a place where I would enjoy the day to day,” he said. He didn’t want to just go from class to his residence hall and back.
He felt he would have that at GCU after taking a three-day Discover GCU trip to campus for prospective students. “GCU was immediately friendly and welcoming. I had this moment of, ‘This place feels like where I could spend the next four years.’”
Orsborn, who grew up agnostic, struggled his freshman year. He was surrounded by the wrong crowd and experienced an identity crisis.
Things started to look up when Orsborn began working for Discover GCU that same year. He wanted others to have the same experience he did when he first stepped onto campus.
But little did he know God had a bigger plan for him.
“I really started being poured into by people I worked with,” Orsborn said. “I felt lowest and emptiest at that point, but the people around me pointed me to Christ.”
He remembers the moment he felt God move in his life for the first time. He was attending a goodbye party with his co-workers at the Chaparral pool, not knowing he would walk out having accepted Jesus into his life.
Orsborn had been overwhelmed with isolation and insecurity. He longed to experience the same joy he saw in others at the party.
After breaking down, his coworkers surrounded him.
“I still remember the exact prayer they said … : ‘Let Jaden accept love from others and God.’ I experienced an overwhelming love and joy of Christ then. I just thought, ‘Why would I want to live for anything else?’
“Without Discover and the community of GCU, I probably never would have come to know Jesus. My life was transformed by witnessing those who knew Christ. Now my mission is to live every day resembling the joy Christ has freely given us.”
– Izabela Fogarasi
Profound message
Aundré Wright was raised by a single mom.
His dad was incarcerated from when he was age 2 to 18, practically his whole life before leaving for college.
“Not having that father figure really just kind of led me down a path where I was involved with things that just weren’t always the best; I was just looking for more of that affirmation,” said Wright, speaking about his childhood growing up in Rancho Cucamonga, California.
And he still was trying to find that affirmation – that “yes” to who he was and, more importantly, where he was going in his life – when he enrolled at GCU as a business student.
Like so many, he fell in love with the campus after a Discover GCU trip.
Wright, who graduated from the university in 2016, said the outset of his freshman year was a dark time. He didn’t know anyone, was far from home, felt disconnected and had no direction.
His relationship with church, “It was kind of off and on,” he said, and he only went because of his mom.
“I really didn’t experience Jesus until I got to GCU,” he said.
He remembers that pivotal moment, when his roommate, “a really cool, awesome guy,” invited him to church at Life Connection, now Alhambra Beloved Community.
It was easy for him to accept that church invitation because of the culture he was immersed in at GCU.
“I sensed there was something different that was going on here,” he said.
He will never forget the sermon that day, when he heard – really heard – what the pastor was saying: “That Christ really came to die, not just for anyone, but for me. That sermon really spoke to me in such a profound way.”
He changed his major the following semester from business to Christian studies with an emphasis in youth ministry.
Wright suddenly knew where he was going and has never wavered in his purpose.
He founded New Culture, a company to help youth aging out of foster care with housing, life skills and mental health support. It serves about 200 young people per year.
Growing up without a father led to his fervor to help young people, and so did finding the Father, something that happened, in part, because of GCU.
“I felt purposeful at a time when I felt like there was no purpose,” he said, and he gained clarity about his future. “… But I also felt like I belonged somewhere.”
– Lana Sweeten-Shults
Here for a reason
Women’s soccer player Addie Vali picked GCU for the sisterhood, culture and competitiveness of the team she was joining.
But looking back, it feels like God chose GCU for her.
Vali transferred here in January 2024, when team physician Dr. Kareem Shaarawy conducted a physical exam and asked about a 2 1/2-inch lymph node on the left side of her neck.
It was dismissed as mononucleosis, but Shaarawy wasn’t as dismissive. A second biopsy found Hodgkin lymphoma. The blood cancer was in its earliest stages.
“If I wasn’t here, that thing would just be growing,” Vali said. “Cancer would be spreading through me.”
While undergoing medical testing, Vali joined a Bible study group of student-athletes. When the diagnosis buckled her spirit, she turned to the group for prayer.
“Prayer was just so strong over me and through every single person in athletics,” she said. “I was mad. Why this? Why me? Why is He doing this in my life? … You don’t just give someone cancer for nothing. Am I being punished?
“We had to go through a ton of conversations through scripture about why this could be happening … It’s honestly a blessing that I grew my faith here. It’s changed me as a person in such a good way to see my teammates so invested in their faith, getting baptized and growing in God’s kingdom and growing their faith.”
Vali underwent four rounds of chemotherapy after going home to Colorado last summer. But before leaving campus, about 200 GCU student-athletes staged a fundraiser and prayer circle for her at GCU Beach Volleyball Stadium.
“That’s where it gets really powerful,” Vali’s mother, Kristen, said. “They all circled her in prayer. She wouldn’t have had that at another school. I feel like she was sent to GCU for a reason. There is just so much faith and positivity at GCU. We didn’t even know about all that when she committed. It’s crazy awesome. Her faith has grown so much through this. A lot of that is being surrounded by it.”
As she turned 20, Vali endured chemotherapy in Colorado while training for a soccer comeback between grueling sessions. Back at GCU, she traveled for two weeks to the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale for radiation treatments on weekdays that began with soccer conditioning in the summer heat.
When she completed her final radiation session, Vali’s teammates surprised her at the hospital wearing “Addie’s fight, our fight” T-shirts and watched her ring the victory bell.
Vali regained her fitness, speed and strength by November and will have three seasons of eligibility remaining for the Lopes.
“I’m here for a reason,” Vali said, as she thought of her teammates, their love, their support, their faith. “… God has a purpose for all of this.”
– Paul Coro
'The bigger the wait,
the bigger the blessing'
Jason Amador was stretching before a Grand Canyon basketball game in November 2024 when students began rushing to their seats and the arena lights hit him like an awakening.
Memories rushed over Amador about life events that guided him to being a GCU walk-on player, a blessing that followed trials of growing up in the Colorado River Indian Tribes community, losing friends and relatives, undergoing double-hip surgery and the closing of his previous college.
Amador approached assistant coach Casey Shaw amid the basketball bedlam and said, “I really want to dedicate my life to Jesus Christ.”
That weekend, the team bus parked by a campus pool before a trip to California. Players and staffers surrounded the water to watch Shaw baptize Amador.
“I realized how blessed I am to be where I am,” said Amador, now a GCU player development specialist. “It wasn’t like I was lucky to land at any school. I was lucky to land at GCU, a Christian school, and to be surrounded by God-fearing coaches.
“It took a lot of ups and downs to get here, failing over and over, being overlooked, having the door shut on me, people making promises and not fulfilling them. I wouldn’t have been able to get through everything unless it was for Jesus Christ. That’s why I dedicate my life to Him.”
Amador grew up in a Christian home near Parker, Arizona, with parents who left him to find his faith path. That was tested at the University of Saint Katherine, a tiny National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics program in San Marcos, California.
A doctor told Amador he needed to stop playing basketball because of deteriorating hips. At age 20, he elected a double-hip surgery often associated with senior citizens.
After being painfully immobile for two months, Amador re-learned to walk as four people helped him with his first step.
“I was starting from scratch, like a little baby,” Amador said.
He progressed, but the rehabilitation sidelined him for two seasons. After returning for 2023-24, an April letter to the St. Katherine student body announced the campus’s immediate closure.
Amador eventually received his kinesiology degree in the mail but was already taking his next step.
After expressing walk-on interest to GCU coach Bryce Drew at a summer camp, Amador emailed GCU Vice President of Athletics Jamie Boggs about his desire to transfer and was re-connected with coaches.
“It was her Christian heart,” Amador said. “I never thought in a million years an AD (athletic director) would read some random kid’s email.”
After five-hour round-trip drives for summer workouts, GCU included Amador on the 2024-25 conference championship team that reached the NCAA Tournament. It was a dream season for GCU and Amador, whose headband-and-ponytail look endeared him to the Havocs student section. They chanted for Drew to insert him into games, culminating with electric moments when he made a layup and a 3-pointer.
“The bigger the wait, the bigger the blessing,” Amador said. “I wouldn’t be who I am if it wasn’t for those trials and tribulations. I thank Him for that. It made me a better person and grew my faith. I put all my faith in Him.”
– Paul Coro
New horizons
Connor Vicary grew up Catholic in his hometown of Morton, Illinois. But he wasn’t strong in his faith.
“I wasn’t anti (religion). I just grew up in it, and I always nodded my head,” said Vicary, who enrolled at GCU in fall 2020.
Being on campus, Vicary noticed how faith-driven students were. “I started to look around and realized how happy these people were,” he said.
He dived into his studies as an entrepreneurship major. Adept at social media, he built a TikTok following that grew to more than 200,000 followers – a business skill that caught the eye of fellow student entrepreneur Jackson Godwin.
Vicary soon joined Jack’s Detail Garage, Godwin’s student-run auto-detailing business.
It was Godwin who opened the doors to Vicary’s faith.
He brought Vicary to his first Bible study and to his church, Pella Communities.
“For the first time in my life, I was really being challenged … and growing in my own faith. I think God put Jackson in my life to create and build out my own faith journey.”
That journey strengthened after John Kaites became dean of the Colangelo College of Business in October 2023.
Kaites told Vicary and Godwin he wanted to revitalize a church targeted for closure. That meant a new staff, including a new teaching team.
Vicary, who was still growing in his faith, told Kaites, “Jackson Godwin is your guy.” Godwin, after all, was going to seminary and wanted to be a pastor.
Godwin told Kaites he would join the church team only if Vicary would.
In addition to serving as acting director of GCU’s Canyon Ventures, which supports startup businesses, Vicary has worked for Kaites for the last two years as a youth pastor at Horizon Church in the Ahwatukee area of Phoenix.
Kaites, the church’s senior pastor, often teaches principles from his devotional, “Fear Not,” which emphasizes to put Christ in the center of your life, to love God and others, and to surrender and serve the Lord.
Once you do those things, you have nothing to fear, Kaites said.
Vicary, who graduated in 2024, has done all those things.
“God put us together in the beginning for this whole plan,” Vicary said of meeting Godwin and of getting to know Kaites and the faith-driven students at GCU. “And this whole plan couldn’t have been bigger than I imagined.”
– Mark Gonzales
He brought her safety
Daria Shlapak grew up in an Eastern Orthodox family in Ukraine.
They would go to church once a year for Easter, and though Shlapak was baptized as a baby, she never developed in her faith.
Instead, she committed herself to rhythmic gymnastics and spent most of her childhood and early teen years competing across the world, even making the Ukrainian junior national team. But a spine injury ended her career and forced her to embark on a new life trajectory.
Shlapak began looking at colleges in the United States, and after a family friend had recommended GCU, she was enticed by the modern campus and feasible tuition costs.
“I had never even heard of Arizona before,” Shlapak said. “I didn’t want to be in the desert because I like nature, but the campus looked very modern, and the application was really simple to fill out.”
Once the grueling visa process was complete and Shlapak had a plane ticket and an acceptance letter from GCU in her hand, she felt hope and a sense of direction.
Little did she know, God was paving the way for her to become a part of a community that would encourage her faith transformation.
“I was very stressed about not making friends. So, when my roommate asked if I wanted to go to church with her, I was like, ‘Sure, church, of course.’ But I really just wanted to spend time with her. I didn’t want to be by myself.
“I went a few times, and the messages really started to hit. It was almost like a joke, ‘Who told God my business?’ There was a song one day about trusting God with your future. That is a scary thing for me because I am very anxious. But hearing that and feeling all the power, I realized He was the one who brought me to GCU.”
At 13, Shlapak’s goal was to go to the Olympics to win a gold medal in rhythmic gymnastics for Ukraine. Her spinal injury didn’t hurt just physically, it affected her purpose and identity.
But now, Shlapak is studying business management with a goal of pursuing a career in project management and event planning that would allow her to serve people and build a joyful community. That might not have happened if she wasn't injured.
“I feel like I had to get injured for me to apply to United States, get into GCU and become a Christian. I was really hurt with everything not working out, but now I realize I was just not meant to be there. GCU was the place for me to find Christ.
“All the bad things that happened, but they weren’t bad enough for me to break. It’s really great to know that there is meaning to your life and purpose in what you are doing. There is a Savior and someone who loves you, despite everything. God is the one that brings me safety.”
– Izabela Fogarasi
A pivotal car ride
It is about 2,500 miles from Suffolk County Community College on Long Island to GCU, and Lucas Patten felt further away from his faith shortly after arriving on campus in fall 2022.
The affable Patten immediately found a group of friends, and the five climbed into a sedan and took a six-hour drive to the San Diego area.
“We're in the car and my friends were asking, on a scale of one to 10, do you think you would get into heaven right now?” Patten said. “Everyone's saying, ‘10, 10, 10.’”
When it came to Patten ranking his chances of getting into heaven, he said either a 4 or 5.
“Everyone laughed at me,” Patten said. “Because everyone knows that it's either one or 10. You're either going to heaven or not.”
That moment was a wake-up call for Patten, a winter 2024 entrepreneurship graduate and the founder and CEO of Powder Pal, a scooper for workout and protein powder.
“That’s when I kind of realized, ‘Wow, I'm kind of not understanding a lot of things,’ “Patten said. “So that's when I started really getting my Word and just getting into a better community that would help grow my faith and launch me to where I needed to be, especially with the business.”
One of Patten’s biggest building blocks in his faith was learning the importance of merging his faith into business.
“My faith and my business are just one, right?” Patten said. “So, if I didn't trust in God, I didn't have the faith, I wouldn't be here. Because when I graduated from college, I didn't have any job, I didn't have anywhere to live. I was just out here.
“I was thinking, ‘What am I doing?’ I was applying for a job, and it got to round four of interviews. It was a great job. And they called me and said, ‘I don't think you're going to have time with your business.’
“And I thought, ‘All right.’ That's a sign that I'm just going to go all in with the business.’ So that's why I did it, and it paid off.”
Building Powder Pal at GCU's business incubator, Canyon Ventures, has enabled Patten to build his faith while expanding his brand, which now includes Powder Pal collagen peptides.
He also attends Pella Communities, a multi-congregational church in Glendale.
Powder Pal’s website states its mission is to “glorify God through innovation, service and excellence" while helping customers live healthier lives. It also emphasizes that Christian faith is foundational to the business. Patten said he wants to live up to the following values: faith, excellence, integrity, stewardship, service and community.
“If you’re in your faith, have direction, a God-given purpose and are called to do something, I feel it’s easy to incorporate (religion and business),” Patten said.
Patten’s confidence was reinforced during Bible study in mid-December when members were asked one thing to think for 2026.
“I said I can confidently know what I’m supposed to be doing every single day,” Patten said. "I have a calling. I don’t have to sit there and wonder, ‘What should I do today? What should I do this year?’ I know exactly what I’m supposed to do.”
– Mark Gonzales
