Tim Gillespie, the campus chaplain at Loma Linda Academy, has been the speaker for this year’s first Week of Prayer at Pacific Union College. The week’s thoughts, summed up in his theme, “The Shallow End of the Pool,” are drawn from Gillespie’s life-long passion for swimming and offer humorous twists to otherwise serious topics like freedom and belonging. While morning sessions retained their typical format, Gillespie utilized an innovative format in the evening meetings in which the audience takes over the microphone and dialogues within itself about the day’s topic.

PUC holds one week of prayer near the beginning of each quarter in order to infuse the student body with a sense of spirituality. Morning classes are shortened from fifty to forty minutes in order to accommodate the additional meeting time.