Ain't it just like a friend of mine to hit me from behind

Autumn came upon me today. With it came feelings of past autumns at Furman. I received a long letter from a friend who’s still there, and it drew my thoughts back to being in college. Last spring when my friends and I were dressed in caps and gowns, walking around smiling and taking pictures, many of us said that we thought graduation would "sink in sometime in the Fall.” I think today was the day. Today I realized I have graduated. It’s not a sad feeling, really, just a strong remembering. I remember where I have been the last four times Summer became Autumn, and I am conclusively aware that I am no longer there.

That said, rather than feeling alienated or longing to return to places in my past, I think I am beginning to settle in here. I have not felt more comfortable or at home since my arrival in Maryland than I did today. This is probably due in part to the fact that we’ve been here 6 weeks and patterns are becoming established. But it is also due to the point we at the TFA have reached in our curriculum. We spent the first several weeks talking about how we approach and know God, highlighting two points: a) the limits of our reason/logic in understanding God and b) the importance of the fact that the Gospel is a narrative. That is, we know God first by the story he has told us of himself, not by a set of facts about him.

To follow and supplement this introduction to knowing God, we have entered a segment of life stories. We read Augustine’s Confessions as a model for how to tell a life story, and now each of the fellows gets an hour and thirty minutes to share his or her life with the group. This has been a monumental and wonderful endeavor. The task of trying to survey, comprehend, and narrate your entire life to others is daunting, yet it is so rewarding! Honestly confessing my life, my successes and failures, has been like rediscovering that I am free, like a reprieve from pretending. Of course, since my arrival here, it was always okay for me to be myself, but it was difficult to do so. (The new environment and unfamiliar faces have forced me to think a lot about what it really means to be myself). But telling my life story was like saying, “Okay, this is me, these are my issues; I am no more or less than this!” It was relieving and freeing to self-disclose.

Telling my life story was great, but better than that was hearing the stories of other fellows. I mentioned earlier “the point we at the TFA have reached in our curriculum,” and this is what I mean: Calvin said that knowledge of God and knowledge of humanity are dependent on each other. We cannot know God unless we know humans, and we cannot know ourselves if we do not know God. I have always given intellectual assent to this idea of Calvin’s, simply because it sounds true. But in sharing life stories we have tested Calvin's idea. We are attempting to understand God better by looking closely at one another.

And, lo and behold, I have realized that Calvin was right. In hearing these life stories, my view of God is being reinvigorated--I am seeing how God cares for and pursues people. I knew from my own life how I have treated God with bitter suspicion and distrust, only to have him love and heal me. And I knew how I have fought to be autonomous and self-righteous, only to have him humble and quiet me. But I have never heard stories in such intimate detail of other believers who have rebelled in different ways and yet found God’s love persistent. Some of us were born in shattered homes where chaos reigned, some of us were obssessive perfectionists clinging to our self-centered plans, some were born with everything we could ever want and yet somehow grew angry at the world. This week I have heard how God broke into the various and sundry defenses that my friends and I have constructed against him—how he has pursued people who run from him. It has given me personal and experiential insight into who God is and how he loves—knowledge that is not readily accessible in the academic study of theology.

The past week has made me wonder why I never sat my close friends down and made them tell me the stories of their lives. I have wondered at great length how to “foster community” and encourage intimate relationships between believers. One would think I might have stumbled upon this brilliant idea before: tell life stories!

Last week’s post was a bit abstract. I may have been thinking a bit too hard. Your comments have been invaluable to me, clarifying what is unclear in my brain. Thanks for helping me stay real. This post is a bit less academic, a bit more personal. I’m still trying to figure out how to blog. Oh, and the sunset is the view from our backyard a week or so agao. That is the Chesapeake bay in all its glorious colors.

What Makes Sense to Me at 23

Above is a photograph of the twelve fellows and the TFA staff. It has nothing to do with my post, per se, but I love the photo. Here we are in all our silly and intellectual glory. Soon, I will put up profiles of each of the fellows so you can get to know my new friends. For now, let's proceed with the issue I left dangling in my last post.

Last time, I hurried through a summary of the talk Os Guinness delivered to us at the TFA three weeks ago. In this post, I want to set off on a rather large venture: I am attempting to understand the concept of Calling and explain it in a useful way. But before I go any further, I must remind you that I am 23 years old. I am barely able to consider myself an adult, and anything I have to say about this topic (or any) should be taken with qualification. I ask you to read this as a work-in-progress by a young individual thinking perhaps too hard about a set of ideas. Fortunately, the blog format allows you to tell me if you think I’m crazy or uninformed. My thinking is only helped by your comments.

I ended the last post with a question: How do I go from being just another person trying to live my life, pay my bills, and avoid loneliness to being someone who lives with purpose and identity before God? Now, this is not the sort of question that one simply knocks down. It is more the type of question that one may poke holes in from many angles so that some light shines through. And that’s what I’m trying to do.

But perhaps the best way to begin poking holes in this question is to discuss how it is that many of us slip through much of life without engaging the question of calling. What do we do wrong?

College graduation is a time of upheaval and adjustment. We leave behind our friends of 4 years, and unlike high school graduation where the next step was obvious (college), there is less apparent direction as to what is next. Should you look for a spouse? Should you get a higher degree? Should you work? Travel? In my last post, I emphasized the paralysis that can come from having too many options. But there is another side of this college graduation conundrum. Although there are many options, there also tends to be a set of imperatives for most of us, the chief of which is financial. We have or seem to have infinite options in life, but we still stare into the unflinching face of some definite imperatives: we have to find somewhere to live and someway to pay for that place.

So it’s time to get a job. And we all want to be happy and fulfilled in what we do, but at the end of college, with those imperatives staring us down, it is much more important to simply have something to do than it is to be engaged in meaningful work. So we get a job using what menial skills our educations have provided us; we work, and we pay our bills. Then, over the next several years, we keep our eyes opened looking for better jobs, better salaries, better uses of our skills, more rewarding work. Maybe we meet someone and get married; then we start paying bills together.

I keep talking about bills because they represent to me the imperatives of life. We have desires and needs: shelter, electricity, water, netflix, you know, the essentials. And those things all come with bills. Bills require income. These are the paths of least resistance, the paths of necessity. We set out to meet our immediate needs with a job and a place to live; then we go about improving that situation. And if you’re like me, these imperatives tend to eminently shape your decisions about life. For instance, one of the practical reasons I came to the Trinity Forum Academy was because it was an easy answer to the two questions: where will you live and how will you support yourself? Yes, I had many other, better sounding reasons for coming here, but killing those two birds with one stone was a huge bonus.

The point I am getting to here is that we easily slide into a way of life that is determined not so much by Calling as by necessity. Then once we get settled into a “normal” life, we ask as secondary questions: why am I here, what is my purpose, how can I serve God in what I’m doing? I want to suggest a different priority in sorting through these questions.

I think finding a Calling is approximately the same as finding a set of problems that you want to and are able, by God’s grace, to engage. Another element is not just wanting to and being able to work on a set of problems, but also have a lifelong commitment to do so. Living with a calling is living humbly committed to redeeming/healing/engaging a set of problems.

What does this look like? Let me illustrate with an example from Os Guinness’s life. Toward the end of his talk, I asked Os about his own sense of calling and how he came to it. He replied that while he was completing his dissertation at Oxford he noticed a gap in the world of Christian thought that he calls “the missing middle.” He saw that there were many Christian scholars writing useful and enlightening material, but they were writing primarily for an audience of academics or “eggheads” as Os called them. At the same time, he observed that the average faithful everyday Christian was not benefiting from that Christian scholarship because it was not written for a lay audience. Os decided to commit his life to bridging this gap in the Church. Rather than writing for the academic world, he decided to write, lecture, and think toward the end of bringing thoughtful Christian scholarship to a lay Christian audience.

Os pointed out that this calling could be pursued in different ways in many different jobs. He has worked for many organizations with several different jobs from which he has attempted to close the gap in this “missing middle.”

The experience Os described seemed to me like it set out a sort of pattern. Os saw a set of problems—the disconnect between much Christian scholarship and the faithful lay people of the Church—and he dedicated himself to resolving those problems. It was not a problem for which an apparent singular cause or solution was apparent, but it was a problem that Os considered to be important enough to be his life’s work.

This sent me into a set of questions (moving from the most large-scale to the most personal): What problems do I see in the world that need to be addressed in my lifetime? In what ways is my world most broken and in need of repair? How must the American church and my denomination change and grow in order to be “the Church” God intends it to be? What problems exist that Wendell might be able to engage and address? What gifts and training has God given to me that may give me a responsibility to approach particular problems?

So I ask you: using the lens of Scripture and your own experience, what do you see that is wrong about the world you inhabit? It could be something truly large-scale like AIDS in Africa, or it could be something very immediate and local like the way everyone in your neighborhood is lonely and afraid. Is your church dead? Is your city fragmented along rigid socio-economic boundaries? Is your denomination out-of-touch? Are your friends all addicted to various “harmless” substances?

There are so many problems that one may easily get overwhelmed. But don’t just think about the problems. Think about who you are and what God has given you; make it personal. Which of these problems do you have eyes to see most clearly? What talents, training, and experiences do you have that you might be able to apply toward a solution for some of these problems?

We are a critical people. My liberal arts education taught me a lot about how to critically analyze the world—to see what is wrong with people’s ideas or actions. Furthermore, Christians tend to be really good at critiquing society. Read one issue of WORLD magazine, and you’ll see Christian journalists pointing with great clarity at things that are broken in the world.

Discovering a calling means moving from being merely the critic to seeing yourself as part of the solution. Being a Christian means being the Body of Christ, the Church, the physical presence of God on earth. That means that when we see things in the world that God wants to change, we are called to change them. To be a Christian is to be called to engage what is wrong with the world and dedicate your life to fixing it. We are God’s hands and feet.

This is a long entry with perhaps too many loose ends. So help me pursue those loose ends. What do you think? What happens when you ask yourself these questions about the world, the Church, and you? Do you see problems you could engage? Do you see too many problems? Too few? Is the notion of Calling any clearer now or only more muddled?

I would love to know what you think!