21 days. That is exactly three weeks. Can you imagine wearing the same 21 clothing items over and over again for three weeks? That includes shoes. With Oregon’s constantly changing weather, that could get complicated.

Now let’s take that to an extreme: What about doing this while simultaneously committing yourself to giving up fast food or only taking cold showers? It gets more complicated, though. What about not being able to wash your clothing in a washing machine unless you have two other people sharing the load?

This is the challenge that 50 University of Oregon college students, all involved with the on-campus InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, volunteered to complete over the past 21 days. The group finished the project this Wednesday night.

The InterVarsity Christian Fellowship is an evangelical group that caters toward both students and faculty on college campuses across the nation. The group’s mission is to transform students and faculty and see the world change before their eyes.

The idea for the project came from other InterVarsity Christian chapters on the West Coast that had previously completed the challenge. The groups shared their results online, inspiring the UO chapter to participate as well. The project was open to everyone on the University of Oregon campus.

The group also held a clothing drive at the end of the challenge in order to give back to the community; the clothing was donated to a Catholic relief organization.

Kayla Sundin, a member of the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, said the InterVarsity group, which meets regularly, focuses on a different theme each term. This term the theme was justice. The idea was that at the end of the challenge, the people involved would see that cutting back on the things that we take for granted could use their disposable income more justly.

“How do you live every day when there is so much oppression in the world and how do you do that with Jesus?” said Sundin. “There is only so much you can do in college so this was meant to be a heart change for the future. It might not be realistic to wear only 21 items all the time but we are hoping that this can be a catalyst for the future and how we can start making those different changes in order to live justly every day.”

Rebecca Mendoza, a University of Oregon senior, was an event organizer for the challenge. Mendoza thought the project was very challenging yet ultimately successful.

“We want God to change our insides as well as outsides. Learning how to think and interact with the world in a different manner, we learn how to be people that are open to being changed and can see things from a different perspective. Justice is more than just words.”

For more information on the group, meeting times and to get involved with future challenges, you can visit the group’s Facebook or the group’s site.