My Day of Writing Essays

As it turns out, a good night's rest, a well-balanced breakfast, prayer, and little bit of yoga was exactly what I needed to get me into essay-writing mode this morning. With the day off from work and the whole house to myself, I utilized the time to the fullest, stopping only for a tiny lunch (I didn't want digestion to interfere with cognition) and to occasionally pace back and forth, attempting to work through my thoughts orally before transcribing them to paper.

Okay, in all honesty, I was not quite that dedicated. It's amazing how, in a time crunch, activities that normally slip under my radar--things like peeling dead skin off of my sunburned legs or finally getting around to figuring out how to use Twitter--suddenly seem to be of the most urgent importance. But nevertheless, with perseverance and the help of a very smart friend who knows me well and is good at proofreading papers, I completed my application and submitted it, two days before the deadline.

Now all I have to do is wait for the wonderful people who have agreed to serve as references for me to submit their online recommendations.

Though I was happy with the way that both of the essays came together, I was especially pleased with the form in which my thoughts found expression in the first essay. I'm happy to share it below:

Traveling—my experiences living, working, serving, and visiting abroad—has had a profound influence on shaping my spiritual life. It is impossible to imagine what my relationship with God would look like today if I had never gone on a short-term missions trip to Kenya, studied abroad in England, or taught English for two years in Japan. My experiences overseas, varied and uniquely meaningful as they may be, have corporately pointed me toward the awareness that God is present and at work in every culture and corner of the world. They have alerted me repeatedly to the fact that God is beyond the limits of my personal worldview, which, incidentally, has been expanded greatly on account of all that I have witnessed and participated in in other countries.

Of all the people I have met, the one who impressed me as best exemplifying the teachings of Jesus was a Muslim woman living in a Nairobi slum. Her cramped little house, smaller than my own bedroom back in the U.S., was home not only to her and her two children, but also to five orphans, unrelated to her, whom she had taken it upon herself to provide for. Though this woman had almost nothing, she gave freely, joyfully, and without fear to those in greater need than she. The impact of her example made Christ’s words in Matthew 25:35-40, “For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat…” more relevant to me than ever before. This encounter continues to influence me in my job, in my volunteer activities, and in my relationships, as I am reminded to choose love rather than fear and generosity before self-interest.

While living in Japan, I was blessed with a situation that led me to a deeper love and appreciation for the Church. Though I mostly grew up going to church, I later became disheartened by the constantly conflicting personalities and opinions in my congregation. I felt compelled to participate in church leadership, but my frustration at fellow members for not sharing my passions and perspectives often drove me away from attending church for a month or longer. In Japan, however, without the close presence of a supportive group of fellow believers, I became aware of just how vital community is to Christian life. I began to attend a small Japanese church and, despite linguistic barriers, was comforted by the communion of saints who, like me, loved Jesus and were trying to discern what it means to live as a Christian. Now that I am back in the U.S., I have a renewed sense of purpose and gratitude for attending my church. The former frustrations still arise, but I know that our love and togetherness will always be, in the words of Thomas Merton, “the resetting of a Body of broken bones.” With confidence that God’s grace is sufficient for all situations, I am grateful to bring my creativity and the unique worldview my experiences have given me into my role of service within that Body.

What Will It Profit?

I spent the morning grappling with the paradoxes Jesus speaks to his disciples in Matthew 16.24-26:

If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life? Or what will they give in return for their life?

Though reason points me toward the conclusion that there is no greater fulfillment in life than to follow Christ, internally I struggle to reconcile willingness and willfulness. The unshakable little voice inside me persists, "But what if...?"

These thoughts followed me through the day at work and into the evening. Dissatisfied and under-challenged as I am in my current employment, I have been spending a lot of my time lately contemplating potential lines of work and seeking inspiration in the matter. But, struggle as I might to reach any definite conclusion, I feel stuck, ultimately afraid to make any big step in a new direction only to possibly fail. If I am to make progress in my search for a vocation, I need to find a way to set fear aside, to choose creativity over predictability and freedom over the suffocating scrutiny of the well-meaning commentators who demand that I have some sort of practical plan for everything I do.

Lord, if You want me to go, I'll go.

I want You to want me to go.

Doing

We are very much concerned with doing The Right Thing. Yet, in our present society, so often characterized by intellectual one-upmanship and relentless rationalizations that drive us incessantly further into ambiguity, The Right Thing is ever elusive. I look around and see many of my friends and others my age in the same condition as I: stagnant, without any especial sense of confidence about where we are or where we are going. If we look to national lawmakers at the moment, we are given little reassurance of our capability as humans to move beyond a battle of thoughts and into any kind of real action. Republican Representatives may have gotten elected for the ideals that they promised to hold firm to, but they were also elected to do a job, and right now doing that job effectively requires that they adhere to the desires of the majority of the American people, and compromise on a plan to raise the debt ceiling. As Theodore Roosevelt once cleverly put it, "In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing."

For me, this is a year that has been characterized by indecision and inconsistency. The person I have become, or rather the person I have shown myself to be, is far from embodying the simple Christian practice to "Simply let your 'Yes' be 'Yes' and your 'No,' 'No'" (Matthew 5:37). When I came back from Japan, I had some ideas of things I'd like to do, but I hesitated to pursue any of them. I created this blog, announcing my intention to update it daily, but quickly relinquished that discipline. Around November I sketched out a grand Plan and announced it to those closest to me, but allowed it to disintegrate less than two months later. And even now, as I type these words, I am tormented with uncertainty over whether decisions I've made in recent months have been the right ones, and I consider whether, for the sake of my own comfort, it would be alright to go back on my promises.

Writing specifically about the time I spend in prayer would seem too personal, too open to misinterpretation by those who read it. I have always found it impossible to express to others the things that I feel God has been "placing on my heart," at least as far as they are understood as such. But I do believe, with utmost certainty, that God speaks to us in ways beyond our normal capacity for perception. And, despite the uncertainties and ambiguities of this last year, God has been persistently building in me an awareness of a Love that persists and prevails through all situations and all time. But it is a Love that, in its very essence, demands response. The grouchy acquiescence to inactivity into which it is often so easy to fall is not only incompatible with the Gospel message, it is impossible if I, in the core of my very being, truly believe that God is Love. But to live with that kind of knowledge, we must relinquish the fear that holds us immobilized by the shackles of "what if?" and step forward in the confidence that Love will be there to greet us.

Beyond the Boat

A windstorm arose on the sea, so great that the boat was being swamped by the waves; but he was asleep. And they went and woke him up, saying, “Lord, save us! We are perishing!” And he said to them, “Why are you afraid, you of little faith?” Then he got up and rebuked the winds and the sea; and there was a dead calm. They were amazed, saying, “What sort of man is this, that even the winds and the sea obey him?”

Matthew 8:24-27

In Matthew’s gospel, we have a sense that the disciples understood by now that Jesus had the power to protect them; in Mark’s account, their plea to the sleeping Christ is not one for salvation so much as exasperation at his indifference toward their seemingly impending doom. Only in Matthew’s gospel do the disciples implore, “Lord, save us!” It seems that, whereas Mark’s disciples still seem to be missing the point altogether, Matthew’s disciples have at least grasped that their Master has the ability to rescue them.

And yet, when he calms the tempest, they are amazed. As the footnote in my Bible helpfully points out, the ability to control the sea was a characteristic attributed to divinity (The psalmist marvels, “You rule the raging of the sea; when its waves rise, you still them” [89:9]). It appears that the disciples, having already witnessed Jesus healing the sick and diseased, believed that he would miraculously preserve their bodies in spite of the storm. The possibility that he would be able to rebuke the very winds and waves that threatened them had probably not even entered into their minds. Thus, Jesus criticizes them for having “little faith.”

Often I find myself slipping into this same fallacious line of thought. Though I’m aware that God has the power to free me from my troubles and concerns, I stubbornly attempt to confine that power to my own relatively narrow point of view. I struggle for solutions, wondering why God isn’t intervening in the ways that seem most obvious, forgetting, for all intents and purposes, that the one I serve has absolute authority over the entirety of space-time.

Christ was aware that God’s ways are beyond the obvious and the immediately relevant. In the desert, he was faced with the temptation of demonstrating evidence of his divine heritage rather than placing absolute faith in God’s Word (Matthew 4:1-11). And yet he chose to let God be God. To the tempter’s seemingly harmless proposal that Jesus “command these stones to become loaves of bread,” Jesus invokes scripture that points to his unwavering faith in God’s preeminence: “One does not live by bread alone; but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” Through Christ’s example, we are challenged to not be misled by easy or “obvious” solutions and to remember that God’s word is sufficient.

At Taizé, I entered into silence hoping that God would use that time to provide me with specific guidance as to what I should do with my future; but I came out of it, instead, with an abounding sense of freedom from worrying about the future or the past and with the hope that, despite my circumstances, I could always find peace in God’s unfailing Love. In the middle of the chaos and anxieties of our jobs, our relationships, our personal struggles for meaning and purpose, we cry to God for redemption. And God replies, “Why are you afraid?” Though we may believe, in principal, that God has the power to rescue us from anything, we are called to expand that belief beyond our own grasp of the situation, to have faith in a Savior who operates outside our realm of understanding and to know that he can not only protect the wellbeing of the people in the boat; he can calm the storm.