Eager Apollos

While I was brushing my teeth the other day I was struck by, what I am assuming was, the Holy Spirit. I was given the inspiration to sit in the library and put up a sign indicating that I will pray with people if they desire some prayer.

It is finals week and the library is filled with students that are cramming for finals, frantically typing papers or groups bickering over their last project. When you look around the fishbowl you see exhaustion on the faces of these study groups occasionally interrupted by moments of levity that get them through the next half hour or so.

Look at the computer screens and you see words racing across a virtual page or power point presentations full of data and graphs. Look at the faces of the typists you see that hope that the next word will be their last.

Between all night study sessions, quad-shot lattes, and Red Bull, Sabbath is the farthest thing from the minds of these students. It is in this context that I hope to offer a moment of rest.

I started late last night and had one taker. A student walked up to me and asked if the sign was mine. I was expecting to pray for all the reasons I just listed above, but I was in for a surprise. The student wasn’t concerned with finals or papers or anything of that nature, but he was worried about his mother.

He made his concerns known and we took a minute and offered up a prayer for her as well as for him. After, we had a brief discussion about each other’s backgrounds and then he jumped back into the fray.

I hung around until about 11pm. I had no other takers and spent my time reading, studying, typing or praying for those around me.

I am trying to spend a couple hours everyday this week in the library. We shall see what God has in store.

Sometimes, ministry is the bane of my existence. Paper work, rigorous study, detailed planning; these aren’t the things that one signs on for when getting into ministry. They are good and necessary activities, vital to the work, but are still activities that grades on a person over time. But in the midst of the mundane, the one activity that never gets old and is always a breath of fresh air is the one-on-one meeting.

For the first quarter I was still getting to know students. The students were still getting used to me. The cadets were unsure of who I was and I didn’t have many contacts out side of the ROTC program. Now that I have been here a while, people recognize me and I am able to see if they are interested in meeting one-on-one.

The conversations are as unique as the students. Sometimes, students just want to vent their frustration with being overwhelmed with life. Occasionally, students are looking to shed light on deep theological mysteries and sometimes we just hang out and shoot the breeze.

This is the work of discipleship. Helping students move one more step in the right direction. Continuing to water the planet that God is growing.

For the past couple of weeks I have been attending the Liberty Club. I was invited by a student that periodically attends The Cave discussion on Fridays, so I decided to show.

The Liberty Club is the objectivist club on campus. The philosophy stems from Ayn Rand and her writings. She was a novelist who wrote well known titles like Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. She espoused a libertarian like philosophy in which government is minimized and personal freedom maximized, hence, the Liberty Club.

Objectivism doesn’t really lend itself to a Christian worldview, which is why I was surprised to get an invite to the meeting. The meeting consist of discussion time of relevant text that were read prior. This week was Chapter 13 of Hobbes Leviathan. While you might not recognized the title you will probably recognize the phrase “the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” This is Hobbes’ view of humanity without a government (specifically, a monarchy). Through power, government enforces the liberties of those under it.

The group noted that this view didn’t jive with Locke’s opinion on the matter. One student summed up Locke’s view like this “we have the right to property because we are God’s sons.” Locke writes about “inalienable rights” which come from our creator.

This launched a discussion as to whether rights were inalienable (innate, bestowed, endowed, or in some sense metaphysical)  or were they merely a product of a social contract (simply agreed upon by society). I pointed out that we (in America) like to talk as if they were inalienable and that Hobbes’ view seems to violate that idea.

Another student then asked, “well can you choose to not be a son of God.” The question was deferred to me (being the resident theologian of sorts). I thought about the question for a moment and trying to stay true to Locke’s way of thinking and the biblical text I said “Humanity was made in the image of God. Its an image that all of humanity shares. This is why it was a sin that Cain killed Abel. In this sense you can’t choose not to be a son (child) of God any more than you could choose not to be human.”

The comment hung in the air for a bit. A couple of the students were intrigued, but time prohibited further conversation and they began talking about club business.

I thought that it was interesting that I was invited to speak to a theological topic, in a context that really didn’t warrant it, without any manipulation on my part. I especially enjoy these kinds opportunities.

As of June 11, 2009 I am a Campus Intern with Campus Ambassadors. My appointment to the position comes with the pleasure of planning for the fall and the character-building burden of raising support for the ministry.

I have to be fully funded by the time I step foot on campus which sets the priority on fundraising, but in between sending letters, making calls and meeting with potential donors I do day dream about what I am hoping to do come the beginning of fall quarter.

One hope for the future is to have some presence within the R.O.T.C. battalion on campus. I would like to do physical training (PT) with the unit on Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings. I have been training on my own in preparation for this opportunity. These future officers tend to be 18-22 and I am not in that age bracket anymore, meaning I am going to have to work harder to keep up. I am sure that even with all my hard work I will be getting a big dose of humility when it comes time to run with this group of soldiers.

I am also hoping that I will be able to train with them during their Lab time on Thursday afternoons. This is a time where they run through battle drills and go on road marches so that these students have some hands on experience prior to going to their summer course where they are evaluated for their leadership potential.

If R.O.T.C. cadets show an interest I want to host a leadership study out of a book called Leading with a Limp by Dan Allender. Allender’s book focuses on leadership as having to do with character and also finding the unique way you lead. I think that the future leaders of the U.S. Army would benefit from reading it. I hope they take me up on offer.

My involvement with the R.O.T.C. unit will depend primarily on the Commander’s approval of my attending these functions, so pray that I put the effort in to prepare myself and for the battalions openness to my presence.

Aside from R.O.T.C., I am planning a program that integrates the arts and the Bible in a way that injects drama into the Biblical text and helps Christians learn to read the world through a Christian lens. An example would be to watch a movie like Scent of a Woman and compare it with the stoning of Stephen in Acts 6-7. Or using Salvador Dali’s painting The Persistence of Memory and compare it to Ecclesiastes 1:2-15.

The general idea being that you take a piece of art (i.e. painting, sculpture,poem, music, film clip) and compare and contrast it with a loosely relevant Biblical text. The students would then have the opportunity to journal about what they experienced, the ideas they tied together and how their viewing of the movie, poem, or what have you, influenced their reading of the text or vice versa. After the journaling time, there would bean opportunity for the students to share what they wrote, either in open mic fashion or maybe I would take submissions and present them the following meeting.

This is going to be quite the experiment. I think that this experience will help students deepen their reading of the Bible and also help them to see how reading the Bible shapes the way we as Christians view the world. I think I will try the experiment every other week for a few months and see if it is accomplishing the goals I am setting for it.

In addition to R.O.T.C. and the experiment I will be doing the weekly meeting, small group bible studies and one-on-one meetings. We will still do the Cave each Friday and the book table on Tuesday. I may even teacha class with Matt (my supervisor). The possibilities are only limited by my time and student interest and I am hoping to have an abundance of both.

In the mean time it is back to sending letters and making calls. My dreaming time is done for the day. Please pray for the ministry of Campus Ambassadors at Central Washington University and that I am fully funded by the time freshmen start moving on campus.