Despite hailing from land-locked Tulsa, Okla., senior Mitchell Mayes found his joy and passion through a ministry called Surfing the Nations. As the name suggests, most of the members enjoy coastal activities such as surfing, which is fitting to their shore-side base in Oahu, Hawaii, where Mitchell interned. His interest in surfing began when his family took vacations to the West Coast and evolved from there.<\/p>\n
\u201cSophomore year, I was starting to search more into what I would do, even outside of majors and everything, and one day surfing came up,\u201d Mitchell said. \u201cIt started coming up more and more, and it looked like that\u2019s what God was wanting me to do. So I said, \u2018Ok, God, I don\u2019t know if you know this, but I\u2019m from Oklahoma.\u2019 That\u2019s when I applied to Surfing the Nations, and it\u2019s crazy how it led to that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Freshman Kelcy Mayes, Mitchell\u2019s sister, agreed that this was God\u2019s calling for him. She said she never would have expected her brother to have taken up something like surfing since they lived hundreds of miles from the nearest shore. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt started with whenever we went to Hawaii in 2010,\u201d Kelcy said. \u201cWe went surfing, and I feel like he just really loved that. But again, I\u2019m from Oklahoma. My family\u2019s more of a mountain family, so it\u2019s not like we go to the beach all the time or he\u2019s always wanted to do that. So I really do think it is a God-given mission for him, because it wouldn\u2019t have been given to him by God if he would have gotten tired of it or if he said, \u2018I\u2019m from Oklahoma, I can\u2019t do this.\u2019\u201d <\/p>\n
Mitchell Mayes said Surfing the Nations had a great impact on him spiritually.<\/p>\n
He said that he was able to thrive and grow spiritually in the atmosphere, and he wants to encourage more Harding students to be involved with the ministry.
\nAccording to their website, Tom Bauer, founder of Surfing the Nations, said the ministry strives to share love through surfing. <\/p>\n
\u201cSurfing the Nations is a non-profit, humanitarian organization run entirely by volunteers,\u201d Bauer said. \u201cOur desire is to see lives changed inside and outside of our organization, locally and internationally. We are a community made up of people who believe in using their talents and passions \u2014 from surfing and beyond \u2014 to give back and share a message of love and hope. We believe surfers have a unique call on their lives: to go \u2014 to use their thirst for adventure to bring them to the places of the world that are in need. We want to give surfers a purpose and a desire to serve others and build friendships all over the world.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Despite hailing from land-locked Tulsa, Okla., senior Mitchell Mayes found his joy and passion through a ministry called Surfing the Nations. As the name suggests, most of the members enjoy…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15086,"featured_media":13491,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13488","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13488","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15086"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13488"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13488\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13491"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13488"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13488"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13488"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}