HO Week 6 (9/30) - Calling

The Audience of One

Bucking the crowd. Marching to the beat of a different drum. Swimming upstream. These are metaphors I find myself identifying with on a regular basis. I’m not an average American 21-year-old (after all, I only joined the 21 club last Sunday). I wasn’t a typical high school teenager either. In Rising to the Call, Os Guinness encourages Christians to live and perform for an audience of one. So I’m on the right track, right?

Wrong. At least, not necessarily right. There are many audiences that the world encourages us to try to please. But the one I want to focus on here is the deceptive audience of one: myself. It’s fairly easy for me to be a maverick and proud of it. However, doing my own thing for the sake of doing my own thing isn’t where I want to be—because if I’m doing my own thing, my focus is off.

The audience of one is not me. The Audience of One is God.

Read that again, Esther. Read it again. {Big sigh} It’s not too difficult for me to do what I want to do, regardless of what other people are doing. What is much more challenging is doing what God wants me to do, regardless of what I want to do. Here I am, back to the same place God keeps bringing me this month: SURRENDER.

I may think I have my life all figured out. But at the end of the day, I am not my most important audience. God is. And when someday the curtain closes on the story of my life, I don’t want my own applause to be the only sound I hear. If there’s only one person clapping, that’s just fine…so long as that person is my Heavenly Father – the true Audience of One.

HO Week 5 (9/23) - Calling

Service vs. Devotion

“Beware of anything that competes with loyalty to Jesus Christ. The greatest competitor of devotion to Jesus is service for Him….The one aim of the call of God is the satisfaction of God, not a call to do something for Him.” ~~~Oswald Chambers

When I read this quote in Os Guinness’ “Rising to the Call” a lightbulb went off in my head unlike either of the other two times I’ve read the book. This quote is applicable to me because it’s a huge temptation of mine to easily get so carried away “serving God” that I have no time simply to be His as my room mate says.

This really dawned on me for the first time last January, I think on one of the days Jill Briscoe came to speak in chapel. Standing there singing, it suddenly dawned on me that there is never never anything I can do to earn my salvation. I shouldn’t try to earn God’s love, because it is a free gift! Everything I do should be a response of love and thankfulness, but not out of a sense of indebtedness. God doesn’t want my good deeds. He wants ME!

It’s super easy for us as college students to get caught up and to busy serving God. It goes back to that article “Human Flourishing” we read the first week. In fact, this issue is my biggest disagreement with that article. There are so many good opportunities for us to serve – especially at a Christian college like JBU. But our number one goal is to be fully Christ’s. We shouldn’t assume our good deeds earn our favor with God when what He’s really looking for is our hearts, yielded to Him.

HO Week 4 (9/16) - Calling

The Story of My Life

Anabel stared up at the mountain peak, just one of a whole range stretching as far as she could see. For days, this view had been on her horizon—threatening her goal by blocking her path. It was as though the mountains knew exactly what she wanted and were laughing at their ability to keep her from attaining it. How long ago had she started on this journey? The weeks and months of toil were blending together…and now suddenly it seemed to be at an end, here at the foot of an insurmountable obstacle.

Each one of us has ambitions. Each has a journey which has brought us to where we now stand. But we rarely see our lives like we see stories. Stories have meaning in every moment—there is rarely a wasted scene in a book or a movie. Thus, we look at our day-to-day existence and think it’s boring. This is the idea Donald Miller wrote A Million Miles in a Thousand Years to combat.

At the risk of sounding “over-saved,” I can honestly say that my main pursuit in life at this moment is to live the life God would have me to live. I know that the best life I could ever live is the one God has planned out for me. He has been reminding me all year that I can trust Him. Sure, I have ideas of the things I would like to do. But if they’re not in God’s plan, He’s teaching me that I can lay them down on the altar. He is my Master, I am His slave.

My life is a conglomeration of many typical story plots…and some which are very unusual. I’ve been impacted by the “good kid from a Christian family” story – the “homeschooled” story – the “love nature & the outdoors” story – the “mid-income, non-extravagant lifestyle” story. Those don’t make me too unique…but then there’s the “I lived in China with my family for seven months when I was in 6^th grade” story. While it was a long time ago…while I was rather young…while I don’t think about it every day…still, this story has had a huge impact on me. God uses all of the stories He has written into each person’s life to create a book that is beautiful, special, and unique. I can trust Him, knowing that each piece of the puzzle that is “me” fits together to create a picture of the “me” He has had in mind from eternity past.

HO Week 3 (9/9) - Calling

[We're reading Donald Miller's A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, and the prompt was to write about a scene of our life depicting a single memory]

Life as a Movie

June 22, 2003—I remember the day well. It was a Sunday morning unlike any of the past 36 Sunday mornings. That morning, I walked through the doors of my home church for the first time in nine months. {I had not been there while my family and I lived in China.}

There was one thing I wanted to do more than anything else – see my best friend, who had promised to email me every day and had faithfully done so. Glimpsing her walking in the hallway, I moved to intercept her. Evidently she had seen me when I saw her, because she had rushed into the auditorium just as I slipped out. She chased me down and we reunited in a joyful hug there in the hallway.

I can still see it in my mind’s eye – I can still remember my almost euphoric happiness that things had finally reached a conclusion – I can still point to the exact spot where it happened. There have been times since when the building has been deserted that I have returned to the spot and relived that moment. For me, it brought the saga of my Chinese experience full circle. Now, at last, I felt truly home.

Those feelings are what make the moment stick in my mind. The relationship and kinship I felt with my friend are what gave those brief moments poignancy. There was a period of time, however, when the memory was bittersweet – when the happiness of the time was dulled by the regret of the present.

A couple years after our reunion, my friend and I had pretty much gone our separate ways. We still saw each other, but I no longer counted her as a close friend. Just this summer, thanks to her initiation, we finally reconnected on a deep level. Suddenly, I again feel that close bond I felt with her so long ago, and I am thankful. It’s a reminder that things don’t always stay the way they are…but that I shouldn’t give up easily on something good either.

Questions about Chapters 1-10:

1. On page 7, Miller says "You get a feeling when you look back on life that that's all God really wants from us, to live inside a body he made and enjoy the story and bond with us through the experience." What do you think of this theologically? I just heard something else like this today...maybe in Integrated Theology...about how God became incarnated to share our experience of life with us.

2. "Without story, experience are just random," Steve tells Don (27). Later, Miller talks about a man who changed his daughter's heart towards him through story. "He realized he hadn't provided a better role for his daughter. He hadn't mapped out a story for his family" (51). We clearly don't want our lives to be meaningless, but to what extent should we try to plan/map out the story of our lives? How does God fit into this picture?

HO Week 2 (9/2) - Human Flourishing

What is True Success?

The school year has started up again, and with it comes another semester of mentoring for Honors Orientation! Here's my blog post responding to the first article for that class.....

College students are busy people—super busy. I’ve been told “College is such a great time of life, you should take advantage of it and experience everything you can!” However, juggling too many balls can result in a feeling of being completely overwhelmed. The arms flail, the balls fall out of control and scatter.

We aren’t supposed to be in control of our lives. Part of the Fall was choosing to believe we know better than God, so the flesh will always struggle to convince us to take things into our own hands. When we yield to the quest for worldly success, we enter into an unending cycle of trying to claim to the top of an ever-extending ladder.

Danielle Sallade says basically the same in her article “Human Flourishing.” She says our work is to be centered on service to Christ and others rather than our achievements. While I agree with her, it’s important for us to also realize that it is just as easy to run ourselves ragged by participating in too much. If I try to serve in every capacity, I will feel just as exhausted as someone constantly striving for human success.

The danger of over-serving is not something Sallade really addressed in her essay. That is what I often find myself caught in. I love helping people. But I am not called to fill every need of each person. That’s Christ’s role, not mine! Sallade does talk about how we should look at our gifts and see how we can best use those in Christ’s service. We are to offer our abilities up to Him, to use as He desires to accomplish His plan. Searching out the will of God and trusting Him is the only way to find true satisfaction in life—not trying to gain all the secular or Christian accolades for being a “successful” person.

{If you're interested in reading more, this is simply the abridged, HO-sanctioned (ie, closer to 250 words) version of a post on Thrive80, where I am a contributor. You can see it "here"}

HO Week 8 (10/15) - Education

[I'm really late on this one...and I'm not doing what the blog prompt said. Oh well!]

The Intrinsic Good of Thinking

I had my girls read "Is Thinking Good for it's Own Sake" by Clifford Williams from The Life of the Mind. It's a really neat article - it makes you think about thinking :D

Williams opens his article by talking about how Americans tend to require everything they do to fulfill a concrete purpose. It's kind of like a quote from a story about the American Revolution. A French general was training American troops, and he wrote to a friend in his country something along these lines: "You tell your European soldier to do something, and he does. But I have to say to my American soldier, 'this is the reason you are to do it', and then he does it."

So often here we look at college and we expect it to accomplish something - like getting us a better job, more money, etc. This easily leads to grade grubbing--only doing enough in a class to pass it and get a good grade, without caring about the subject matter. Williams argues that this should not be a student's only focus.

Instead, he says, students should see knowledge as intrinsically good - valuable in and of itself, without reference to what it can get you. Williams makes the point that, especially as Christians, we should desire knowledge for it's own sake (because God values it) and not only for the material benefits we get from it. There is beauty in the process of discovering, and we should enjoy that.

HO Week 7 (10/8) - Education

[As you can see, I'm quite late on this one.]

What is Learning?

Learning is the ability to take a new concept and to digest it--to really understand it. Moreover, true learning will also include applying the new knowledge to your own life and to the greater community around you. Learning is also the ability to make connections between what one is currently studying and what one already knows. It is creating one's view of the world - building a system for how things work.

[Brad had us write for a few minutes in class about what our definition of learning was. That's what I wrote. If you want more info, read my girls' posts. They were good :)]

HO Week 6 (10/1) - Education

Are Students Banks or People?

How to best educate students is an interesting question, and one we will be examining for the next couple of weeks. An educator named Paulo Freire wrote a book entitled The Pedagogy of the Oppressed in which he discusses this topic. In his second chapter, he sets forth two methods of educating. I have experienced both during my life.

In my senior year of high school I took Chinese at a community college. Understandably, most of what we students had to do was memorize vocabulary words. This idea of students being passive receivers/memorizers is what Freire refers to as the "banking concept." The teachers are in total control of the situation, and they are often seen as knowing everything about their subject. They make "deposits" of knowledge into the "banks" (students). Students are supposed to meekly accept, swallow, and parrot whatever the teacher says. This method is almost unavoidable in a foreign language class. When it is employed in other classes (history, for example), however, Freire says that it "minimize[s] or annul[s] the students' creative power" (73) and serves to make them less human.

The English 2 honors class I took last semester was in stark contrast to the banking model. Although the professor did sometimes lecture about what we were reading, she mostly encouraged us to discuss what we had noticed in the texts. This is what Freire calls the "problem posing" method of education. This method focuses on "acts of cognition, not transferrals of information," Freire says (79). It also means that the teacher becomes more of a fellow student - someone who can gain just as much from the class as the "real" students do. "Problem posing" forces students to think things through rather than be spoonfed all the answers.

Clearly, the latter method is preferable.

HO Week 4 (9/17) - Calling

My Natural Strengths

In this week's posts, students are to compare their spiritual gifts with their strengths (based on the StrengthsQuest survey). So as a refresher: my top spiritual gifts are Faith, Serving, and Leadership/Administration or Pastoring/Shepherding. My top five strengths (from when I took the test for Gateway last fall) are Belief, Responsibility, Discipline, Intellection, and Connectedness.

Belief obviously ties into Faith. This is one that I hadn't really thought about/recognized in myself until I did these tests. I think it's because my beliefs and faith are such a part of me that I don't think that's unusual. I feel as though all Christians should care that much about their beliefs. The down side to this is that I can tend to be very set in my ways, even in minor things, because I take my beliefs so seriously. Intellection probably goes along with Faith as well. I have strong beliefs, but I want to know why I believe those things as well. I want it to be grounded in reason, not "just because."

Responsibility and Discipline go along with Leadership/Administration and probably with Serving too. An example is the work I did the last two years of high school. I had a class with the same teacher for three years, and after the first year she asked me to be her assistant, probably because of the discipline I had exhibited in class. Ever since then, I have been her administrative assistant of sorts, helping her each summer get things set up for the new school year. This ties together all four of the things listed above - and I love doing it!

When I took the StrengthsQuest, I was most surprised by "Connectedness." I was a little worried about it too, because it sounded almost New Age-ish. I have come to realize that I do look for connections in things though. I feel like this might go along with the Shepherding gift - of wanting to show people that they're not just out on their own, they are part of a bigger plan: God's plan.

HO Week 3 (9/10)

My Spiritual Gifts

[yep, I'm a little late on this one too.]

For the next couple of weeks, we are going to be talking about "calling" (as in vocation and/or spiritual gifts). We are reading Os Guinness' book Rising to the Call, and the students take a spiritual gifts assessment. This post is a response to the second part.

Dr. Gambill, the instructor, provided links to two online gift inventories. One is a bit more charismatic, and the other is designed to help people know where to plug into their church (so it only addresses what they call "Team Gifts"). I took both tests, and I have the results from the one I took last year as a freshman in the class. It's just interesting seeing how the different ones end up with slightly different results.

Last year, my top three gifts were listed as Serving, Giving, and Faith. On the first one this year, it came up with Faith, Helps (basically Serving), and Music (Pastoring was 4th). The second test was Administration, Shepherding (Pastoring), and Serving [this test had a disclaimer that lots of women get Shepherding because it's similar to nurturing instincts].

I basically agree with what these tests came up with. The last test I took had several paragraphs about each of the gifts, including some tendencies and possible pitfalls, and I certainly identified with those! Last year when I took it, I was surprised to see Faith on there...but I have come to realize that is a big part of who I am. Serving is also definitely one of the things I do a lot. I love helping other people in whatever ways I can. I love to Give other people presents to show I care about them. I'm not too surprised about Administration either. I am an organized person who likes to take charge sometimes!

The only one I'm not so sure about is Shepherding. I think the reason I feel uncertain about it is that I feel strongly that women should not have leadership over men. And yet I so often see that I have leadership tendencies! Sometimes I wonder why in the world God would give me leadership gifts and yet make me a woman. [By the way, leadership was 4th on the list from last year, 16th on the first test this year (too low I think), and I think it was basically included in Administration on the second test.] I'm coming to realize that there really are ways where I can stay true to both my belief and my gift. For example, what I'm doing this semester! My mentor group is all girls, and so I feel comfortable guiding and directing them.

[Sorry girls, I know I went way over the word limit on this one!]

HO Week 2 (9/3)

How to Impact the Culture

[It's week 2 because there wasn't a post for the first week. And yes, I am late on posting this!]

For the second week of Honors Orientation, we read the first chapter of Mark Noll's The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. Through his book, Noll makes the case that Christians have not given themselves enough to the pursuit of intellectualism. While I strongly disagree with his categorization of creationists, I did agree with his main point and many of the things he said. It was a thought provoking chapter, and I certainly want to read the rest of the book.

Noll talks about the "life of the mind," meaning "the effort to think like a Christian—to think within a specifically Christian framework—across the whole spectrum of modern learning" (7). I am familiar with this same concept being referred to as having a Christian world view. Noll goes on to describe three areas where Christians have failed to be active participants: the areas of culture, intellect, and theology.

I see myself as most likely to impact the area of culture. Noll makes the case that Christians focus too much on “urgencies of the moment” or “over-simplification of issues” when they try to change the culture (12), and I can see his point. The reason I am studying journalism is so that I will hopefully be able to play a part in changing the culture of America. I have strong beliefs about many cultural issues, and I believe that God has given me the gift of writing well. I want to combine these two characteristics by writing as a political or cultural analyst, encouraging Christians to think about issues from a Christian world view.

Introduction

So, this blog will be added to my long list to perform a more formal function - posting blog posts about the readings in Honors Orientation. Yes, I did take HO when I was supposed to in my freshman year, but now I get to take it again without the "pressure" of passing because I am a mentor for four terrific freshman gals! :D After the class and semester finish, I may use this blog to post some of the other things I have written for college so far....we'll see......