Confession: This Semester

Before I get into this’n it’s been freeing to say, “I was wrong.” At the end of the summer I planned out the semester, 12 hours of classes didn’t seem too bad. I’d taken a couple grad level classes before in undergrad so it seemed like it’d be doable. Mom said it was too much – she was right, I wasn’t.

It’s safe to say this has been one of the most difficult semesters I’ve had. Sure some undergrad semesters were hard, and when finals came they were really gross, but this one is taking the cake in the realm of stress, tiredness and changes. There’ve been a few breakdowns.

Taking the workload from school, the job at the church, fostering a new relationship and the normal things of life all together has been rich and difficult. Rich because there’s much to learn and much to be humbly amazed by; difficult because I’m prideful and thought I knew it all and this has been three months of being wrong. (In some ways I feel like a raw blister - hyperaware of failures.)

Yet there are three thoughts, which have made this semester more bearable:

1) Bear your burdens well.

Sure they’re heavy and sure they’re daunting, but they’ve been given to you by God to bear, so bear them well. Be emboldened by the simple fact of knowing God – for his own reasons – planned this.

 2) It’s good to be carefree.

When the moments of relaxing come, take them. Whether they’re on Skype, a phone call, staring at the stars from my front porch, in a book, with the roommates, or holding a sleeping nephew whenever and wherever learn to relax in a moment. 

 3) (This has been the most difficult to remember) your biggest problem has been taken care of by Jesus.

This one is beautiful. At the end of any day you can lay your head down on your pillow and remember it’s not your education that saves you, your job that saves you, your interactions that save you, but it’s Jesus’ death on a Roman cross two-thousand years ago that has saved you.

Sure I don’t remember all of these all the time. But at the end of my life – whenever that may be – this semester will be just a simple dark place in the patchwork of life – the dark tiles of a mosaic without which the picture is lost. You see it’s a perspective thing seeing life from the vantage point of farther along.

Rumored Thought (Pt. 2)

Check out Part 1

Safety in mission is a relative impossibility, rather implausibility.

My dad told me just before I trounced off to Egypt for a summer, “I know you’ll be safe, ‘cause you’re in the center of God’s will -- but I guess that’s not safe, it’s just right.”

We can’t embark on mission and expect to come out the other side the same. We’ll be changed; we’ll be effected by what we’ve seen, whom we’ve spoken to, and the relationships we’ve built.

If we informally understand safety as the retention of normality than we must never see mission as safe. (And more often than not when we, as modern Americans, talk about safety we mean the normal.)

Internationally I’ve been in some rather dangerous experiences all for the sake of mission (things I’ve not told my mom… until she reads this that is), it wasn’t safe. Locally I’ve been in situations just as hairy.

My point is this: mission will never leave us the same. It won’t allow us to be just as spunky as we were when we were kids. It’ll wear our souls out and cause us to be ragged and rough. It won’t polish us up and let us be the neat little Christian legalism has told us we ought to be.

“The Prince of Darkness grim, we tremble not for him;

His rage we can endure, for lo, his doom is sure, 


One little word shall fell him….

Let goods and kindred go, this mortal life also;

The body they may kill: God’s truth abideth still,

His kingdom is forever.”

Life is a tempest, which will drowned our tiny boats eventually. We are not as we once were; we are not children anymore. No, and the cares of life have brought us the realization of reality. So why should mission be different? Why should mission cause us to be clean and neat and safe when it asks us to do precisely opposite?

No. No, mission isn’t safe, and we’ll not come out the other side of it the same. Thank God.