The weather in DC has been really nice lately. Mid 70’s, sunshine, and a gentle breeze constantly call me away from work and classes. It’s always around this time of year when I wish I was back home doing yard work again, enjoying the simple pleasures of Ohio and being outdoors. The rusty and rosy foliage of Ohio’s trees far outperforms the shades of yellow and brown we see here in the Mid-Atlantic. I miss the apple-picking, corn fields, and morning chill of Ohio’s autumn.
The townhouse I live in is surrounded by other houses and trees which block the morning sun, and I’m pretty sure this is having the effect of making me sleepy in the mornings when I ought to be wide awake. I can’t wait until the leaves fall and the sunshine peeks through to greet me in the morning. I’m certain that a quiet cup of coffee and a seat beneath the window in a sun-soaked chair is God’s gift for mornings.
This weekend I’m looking forward very much to getting off campus. There’s an InterVarsity retreat for fellas, and we’re planning on going up the Potomac River for some male-bonding and camping. The annual retreat is always a treat, and I’m looking forward to bonfires and sports and sharing and all the sorts of things that go along with getting off campus with other guys for a while.
Thursday, September 28, 2006
Friday, September 22, 2006
A Superman to Me
I used to be a wrestler. In an unevenly matched two-on-one competition, my brother and I would roll around with my dad, giggling wildly as our hero easily overpowered us. He was strong—a superman when we were little. If our dad could pin one of us while tickling the other at the same time, certainly he could stop trains and save cities and fight evil. My dad was the strongest and most noble fellow in the world.
As a teenager, my earlier views of superman faded. Suddenly my dad became very human and just another man among others. At the time, I did my best to tip over all the sacred cows of hero-worship in my life. To an insecure, not-so-cool junior higher, my dad’s bib-overalls and sometimes folksy appearance made him become the biggest dork in the world. His coffee(and perhaps Spirit)-inspired theological rantings on the way to church Sunday mornings sounded like background static to my self-perceived finely-tuned spiritual ears. In an adolescent quest to “find myself,” I also found ways to distinguish myself from him. Dad was in a union, I became a capitalist. He was a rough-and-tumble outdoorsman, I began practicing the piano. He liked to wrestle, I joined drama club.
The past few years, as I’ve finally begun to figure out the kind of guy that God wants me to be, I’ve realized more and more how much I take after my dad and still look up to him. It began with small things like drinking coffee with a little bit of milk, just like him. Then I noticed similarities to my dad in some of my attitudes and perspectives on life. As a student at Georgetown, I find his suspicions of intellectualism present in my own mistrust of the academy. As a young guy looking for a career, the hard-working but sensible middle-class life that my dad leads is becoming more and more appealing to me. Today, more often than not, I look up to my dad as the example of a godly father and hard-working provider that I hope to be for my own family some day. I reckon that he has once again become the superman whom I admired when I was little.
Still, he’s a human superman. When you live with someone – especially family members – it doesn’t take long to figure out that they have imperfections. I’ve found this to be the case with my dad. The situation becomes much more personal, though, when I discover these same shortcomings in my own life. It seems that, along with the good I emulate in my dad, there comes some of the bad too. It’s interesting how Scripture so clearly anticipates and describes this truth. Jeremiah 31:29, a passage my dad shared with the family one Sunday morning, says, “The fathers have eaten a sour grape, and the children's teeth are set on edge.” Sin's impact has the effect of being passed on and continuing through the generations. Exodus 34:7 describes how God’s justice is carried out when “he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation."
Despite these seemingly unbendable rules, the message of the Gospel offers hope for breaking the patterns of generational sin and guilt. When a fellow asks Christ in Matthew 12:48, “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?,” the Savior replies, “Here are my mother and my brothers! For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.” Knowing Christ and participating in the unfolding will of God brings us into a new reality. Our new family becomes spiritual, our new identity from a second birth (Jn. 3:3). Relations are no longer by blood, but by water through a participation in baptism and by a common profession of faith (Eph. 4:4-6). All former distinctions – social, cultural, familial – are reconstructed in the Kingdom of Heaven, where “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, for (we) are one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28). Christ breaks into our lives, giving us radically new identities in him and shattering the patterns and expectations of our old selves. We become fresh again as new people in Christ when we allow our Savior to re-form us in himself. This gives us a bright hope and opportunity for freedom from the sins of our parents and the patterns of imperfections that have been passed on since Adam.
Both my dad and I have become new men in Christ. Our Savior has changed our lives, and we’ve got new identities in the Messiah. Our relationship is still one of blood—that is, physically I am his son, but it is also one of water—that is, spiritually he is a mentor to me and an example of Christ’s redemptive work. Like me, my dad is not perfect. Still, though, I see that God is in the process of transforming him into the spiritual superman that I’d like to become.
As a teenager, my earlier views of superman faded. Suddenly my dad became very human and just another man among others. At the time, I did my best to tip over all the sacred cows of hero-worship in my life. To an insecure, not-so-cool junior higher, my dad’s bib-overalls and sometimes folksy appearance made him become the biggest dork in the world. His coffee(and perhaps Spirit)-inspired theological rantings on the way to church Sunday mornings sounded like background static to my self-perceived finely-tuned spiritual ears. In an adolescent quest to “find myself,” I also found ways to distinguish myself from him. Dad was in a union, I became a capitalist. He was a rough-and-tumble outdoorsman, I began practicing the piano. He liked to wrestle, I joined drama club.
The past few years, as I’ve finally begun to figure out the kind of guy that God wants me to be, I’ve realized more and more how much I take after my dad and still look up to him. It began with small things like drinking coffee with a little bit of milk, just like him. Then I noticed similarities to my dad in some of my attitudes and perspectives on life. As a student at Georgetown, I find his suspicions of intellectualism present in my own mistrust of the academy. As a young guy looking for a career, the hard-working but sensible middle-class life that my dad leads is becoming more and more appealing to me. Today, more often than not, I look up to my dad as the example of a godly father and hard-working provider that I hope to be for my own family some day. I reckon that he has once again become the superman whom I admired when I was little.
Still, he’s a human superman. When you live with someone – especially family members – it doesn’t take long to figure out that they have imperfections. I’ve found this to be the case with my dad. The situation becomes much more personal, though, when I discover these same shortcomings in my own life. It seems that, along with the good I emulate in my dad, there comes some of the bad too. It’s interesting how Scripture so clearly anticipates and describes this truth. Jeremiah 31:29, a passage my dad shared with the family one Sunday morning, says, “The fathers have eaten a sour grape, and the children's teeth are set on edge.” Sin's impact has the effect of being passed on and continuing through the generations. Exodus 34:7 describes how God’s justice is carried out when “he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation."
Despite these seemingly unbendable rules, the message of the Gospel offers hope for breaking the patterns of generational sin and guilt. When a fellow asks Christ in Matthew 12:48, “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?,” the Savior replies, “Here are my mother and my brothers! For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.” Knowing Christ and participating in the unfolding will of God brings us into a new reality. Our new family becomes spiritual, our new identity from a second birth (Jn. 3:3). Relations are no longer by blood, but by water through a participation in baptism and by a common profession of faith (Eph. 4:4-6). All former distinctions – social, cultural, familial – are reconstructed in the Kingdom of Heaven, where “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, for (we) are one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28). Christ breaks into our lives, giving us radically new identities in him and shattering the patterns and expectations of our old selves. We become fresh again as new people in Christ when we allow our Savior to re-form us in himself. This gives us a bright hope and opportunity for freedom from the sins of our parents and the patterns of imperfections that have been passed on since Adam.
Both my dad and I have become new men in Christ. Our Savior has changed our lives, and we’ve got new identities in the Messiah. Our relationship is still one of blood—that is, physically I am his son, but it is also one of water—that is, spiritually he is a mentor to me and an example of Christ’s redemptive work. Like me, my dad is not perfect. Still, though, I see that God is in the process of transforming him into the spiritual superman that I’d like to become.
Thursday, September 21, 2006
Campus Lemons to Gospel Lemonade
One of the largest deposits of my time and talents here at Georgetown has been InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, an inter-denominational group of believers seeking to make Christ known on campus. I first got involved in a small-group Bible study my freshman year, and since then the community has been the bedrock of my Georgetown experience. InterVarsity has been a place where God’s given me the grace to be vulnerable and open myself up, allowing me to share with others the successes and failures of my Christian walk. I've been served and am able to serve others through this fellowship while God has continued to grow me up in faith. This year, for example, I’ve been learning much as the leader of a men’s small-group Bible study.
It came as quite a surprise, then, when I returned from summer vacation to learn that Georgetown had disaffiliated itself with InterVarsity and all other Christian ministries from outside the university. In a letter to the InterVarsity staff, the Office of Campus Ministry said that our community was no longer welcome to have any presence at Georgetown. We could not utilize university rooms, poster or flyer, or have any other representation on campus. Suddenly my entire fellowship was made illegal and forced underground.
After learning of the university’s decision, the IV vision team went ahead with a previously-planned leadership retreat. With everyone back from summer vacation, the retreat had originally been planned to set the vision for our fellowship this year -- growing as a witnessing community for Christ. Instead, we launched into crises mode and began to deal with the fact that Georgetown IV was no longer. At first, the tone of our retreat was one of surprise, shock, and anger. We could not imagine how the people in Campus Ministry were able to eject us from campus in good conscience. The number of participants in our ministries far exceeded their own, and we had seen God powerfully move in IV time and time again. Perhaps it was jealousy, we suspected, or different theological views that had caused the rift. IV had previously been under the authority of Campus Ministry, and the relationship was often very rocky. Campus Ministry was suspicious of IV, warning us against proselytizing and burdening us with draconian measures to limit our activity on campus. Whatever Campus Ministry’s motives, we were certain that they were wrong.
Somewhere in the course of the retreat, though, God changed our hearts. Instead of being cynical about the decision, we became thankful. We came to see the decision as more of an opportunity to witness to the Georgetown community than we had ever been given before. We remembered how, last spring, members of our community fervently prayed for change in the fellowship. We had asked God to shake us up and then settle us more on Himself, and we realized that Campus Ministry’s decision was an unexpected way that He was answering our prayer. We also prayed for Campus Ministry itself, realizing that its Catholic and Protestant leaders love Jesus just like we do. By the grace of God we saw that we were on the same side as Campus Ministry, all of us doing our best to make the Gospel known. The different groups have different methods, for sure, but we serve the same Christ.
After returning from the leadership retreat, there was a firestorm of media. Everyone from the Washington Post to Focus on the Family gave their perspectives on our plight. Most were sympathetic to our situation, portraying the formerly-affiliated ministries as a David fighting against the Goliath of Campus Bureaucracy. While we were reluctant to frame our situation this way, most media did a fine job of demonizing the “other side.” It was quite a struggle during this time not to feel self-righteous or to join in the chorus of accusations against Campus Ministry, but I’m confident we emerged from the debacle with our witness relatively unscathed. We were humble to the point where it seemed like we were bending backwards to respectfully accommodate Campus Ministry’s decision, and our pride took quite a beating as we sought forgiveness for our own wrongdoing from the Protestant chaplains.
Since the original decision was made, Campus Ministry has softened its stance toward us. IV is allowed to have a presence on campus, but we are no longer allowed to be affiliated with the university. We can flyer and rent rooms for our large-group meetings just like any other students, but we have no connection with Georgetown. We have gone full-steam-ahead with all the plans we had for this school year, including growing as witnessing community. The press we’ve received has only managed to grow the number of people we can reach out to, and the perceived difficulties of being a fellowship underground has united us in purpose. Since school began, we have met daily for prayer and praise. We have already begun to see God move in ways that we could have never imagined – friends once hostile to the Gospel are coming with us to visit church, friendships with believers who have fallen from fellowship have been rekindled, and there is a palpable passion for the work that God has us to partner in. We are thrilled with what God has done in our fellowship through the past few weeks, and have come to see clearly how God has used our unexpected circumstances for our unexpected blessing. Our Father has been faithful all along, and His Word is going forth at Georgetown in fresh and spectacular ways.
It came as quite a surprise, then, when I returned from summer vacation to learn that Georgetown had disaffiliated itself with InterVarsity and all other Christian ministries from outside the university. In a letter to the InterVarsity staff, the Office of Campus Ministry said that our community was no longer welcome to have any presence at Georgetown. We could not utilize university rooms, poster or flyer, or have any other representation on campus. Suddenly my entire fellowship was made illegal and forced underground.
After learning of the university’s decision, the IV vision team went ahead with a previously-planned leadership retreat. With everyone back from summer vacation, the retreat had originally been planned to set the vision for our fellowship this year -- growing as a witnessing community for Christ. Instead, we launched into crises mode and began to deal with the fact that Georgetown IV was no longer. At first, the tone of our retreat was one of surprise, shock, and anger. We could not imagine how the people in Campus Ministry were able to eject us from campus in good conscience. The number of participants in our ministries far exceeded their own, and we had seen God powerfully move in IV time and time again. Perhaps it was jealousy, we suspected, or different theological views that had caused the rift. IV had previously been under the authority of Campus Ministry, and the relationship was often very rocky. Campus Ministry was suspicious of IV, warning us against proselytizing and burdening us with draconian measures to limit our activity on campus. Whatever Campus Ministry’s motives, we were certain that they were wrong.
Somewhere in the course of the retreat, though, God changed our hearts. Instead of being cynical about the decision, we became thankful. We came to see the decision as more of an opportunity to witness to the Georgetown community than we had ever been given before. We remembered how, last spring, members of our community fervently prayed for change in the fellowship. We had asked God to shake us up and then settle us more on Himself, and we realized that Campus Ministry’s decision was an unexpected way that He was answering our prayer. We also prayed for Campus Ministry itself, realizing that its Catholic and Protestant leaders love Jesus just like we do. By the grace of God we saw that we were on the same side as Campus Ministry, all of us doing our best to make the Gospel known. The different groups have different methods, for sure, but we serve the same Christ.
After returning from the leadership retreat, there was a firestorm of media. Everyone from the Washington Post to Focus on the Family gave their perspectives on our plight. Most were sympathetic to our situation, portraying the formerly-affiliated ministries as a David fighting against the Goliath of Campus Bureaucracy. While we were reluctant to frame our situation this way, most media did a fine job of demonizing the “other side.” It was quite a struggle during this time not to feel self-righteous or to join in the chorus of accusations against Campus Ministry, but I’m confident we emerged from the debacle with our witness relatively unscathed. We were humble to the point where it seemed like we were bending backwards to respectfully accommodate Campus Ministry’s decision, and our pride took quite a beating as we sought forgiveness for our own wrongdoing from the Protestant chaplains.
Since the original decision was made, Campus Ministry has softened its stance toward us. IV is allowed to have a presence on campus, but we are no longer allowed to be affiliated with the university. We can flyer and rent rooms for our large-group meetings just like any other students, but we have no connection with Georgetown. We have gone full-steam-ahead with all the plans we had for this school year, including growing as witnessing community. The press we’ve received has only managed to grow the number of people we can reach out to, and the perceived difficulties of being a fellowship underground has united us in purpose. Since school began, we have met daily for prayer and praise. We have already begun to see God move in ways that we could have never imagined – friends once hostile to the Gospel are coming with us to visit church, friendships with believers who have fallen from fellowship have been rekindled, and there is a palpable passion for the work that God has us to partner in. We are thrilled with what God has done in our fellowship through the past few weeks, and have come to see clearly how God has used our unexpected circumstances for our unexpected blessing. Our Father has been faithful all along, and His Word is going forth at Georgetown in fresh and spectacular ways.
Wednesday, September 13, 2006
It's been a while...
I reckon it’s time to return from my blogging hiatus and to share a little about how my summer went. You might recall from the blog that I kept during my stay in Israel that I would be self-employed in Ohio this summer. Now that it is September, I can say with a big smile that God provided abundantly for all my needs: as a man who needs to be kept busy during the day, God gave me plenty of work and opportunities to take my grandpa for long car rides; as a college student who needs money to pay for the rent in Georgetown, God gave me plenty of financing; and as a study-abroad student looking to settle back into American life, God gave me a patient family and the countless comforts of home. It was both a gift and pleasure to spend the summer in Ohio working by the sweat of my brow by day and growing in relationship with others and God by night. I appreciated home more than I ever expected was possible, and rare was the day when I took for granted my summer life. Highlights were a trip with Luke to a weekend bluegrass festival in Kentucky, the annual Midwest Camp Bike Trip, and the Steidl Family Reunion. More than a couple friends got engaged, a woman younger than my mom passed away at church, and now, at the beginning of September, I find myself three months older than I was in the middle of June. I began lifting weights and wearing cologne this summer to see if I might trick some unsuspecting girl into marriage. So far I’ve had no luck, but I’m keeping my eyes peeled, my muscles toned, and my Wrangler perfume close-at-hand in these last couple semesters at university.
In this new blog, I hope to keep you and me updated twice a week on the goings-on in my life. Thoughts and opinions and commentaries are constantly running through my head, and every once in a while I hope to capture them in writing for my own clarity of thought. As a Christian believer, I think about the Kingdom and witness and sin and salvation and God’s will and the world and Heaven and mystery. As a government student, I think about politics and elections and international relations and justice and law and parties and theories. As a theology student, I think about the Bible and hermeneutics and languages and doctrines and histories and cultures and religions. There is often no method to the madness in my mind, and in the same way there will probably be no systematic approach to what I share in this blog. Hopefully, though, it will provide a window through which everyone can see me and the fella whom God is building me up to be.
I’d encourage your input in the process. If it seems like I’m departing from sound teaching, doctrine, or thought, please let me know -- I promise to think long and hard about it. I won’t pretend to know all the answers, but I will look forward to correction and/or encouragement. Thanks for reading along, and I hope this new blog is helpful for everyone who gets to participate.
In this new blog, I hope to keep you and me updated twice a week on the goings-on in my life. Thoughts and opinions and commentaries are constantly running through my head, and every once in a while I hope to capture them in writing for my own clarity of thought. As a Christian believer, I think about the Kingdom and witness and sin and salvation and God’s will and the world and Heaven and mystery. As a government student, I think about politics and elections and international relations and justice and law and parties and theories. As a theology student, I think about the Bible and hermeneutics and languages and doctrines and histories and cultures and religions. There is often no method to the madness in my mind, and in the same way there will probably be no systematic approach to what I share in this blog. Hopefully, though, it will provide a window through which everyone can see me and the fella whom God is building me up to be.
I’d encourage your input in the process. If it seems like I’m departing from sound teaching, doctrine, or thought, please let me know -- I promise to think long and hard about it. I won’t pretend to know all the answers, but I will look forward to correction and/or encouragement. Thanks for reading along, and I hope this new blog is helpful for everyone who gets to participate.
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