Is There Meaning in the Madness? Seeing Human Tragedy Through Gospel Eyes



Andy Wood is the RUF Campus Minister at Virginia Tech


In December 2011, when news that a police officer had been shot and that the suspect was somewhere on the campus of Virginia Tech (VT), many immediately dreaded a repeat of the April 2006 shooting there that left 32 people dead, including 26 students.

Reformed University Fellowship (RUF) Campus Minister Andy Wood (MDiv ‘05) remembers, “When the shooting happened in December, I was in Dallas at RUF training. The text messages started rolling in. RUF staff training stopped. We prayed for whatever was going on. The event provoked the same fears over again in many of the students, and even in us as the staff.”  In December 2011, when news that a police officer had been shot and that the suspect was somewhere on the campus of Virginia Tech (VT), many immediately dreaded a repeat of the April 2006 shooting there that left 32 people dead, including 26 students.

Far beyond the initial reactions, the age-old uncertainty pressed many to ask, “Why would God allow something like this to happen? How could it happen to one of our own?

ASKING THE HARD QUESTIONS
In the widespread preponderance of ease, comfort, affluence, provision, and sufficiency of our modern world, there is something marked in the questions that dominate life. What does it say about us that we often presume the absence of God (or at least his benign non-interference) in the good, while arguing his willful neglect (or worse) in tragedy? The prevalence of blessing with the absence of gratitude generates a mentality of entitlement—and entitlement requires no thankfulness. There is little, perhaps, that prods the comfortable life as much as tragedy and loss, which can either lead people to ensconce themselves in spiritual disdain or cause them to open up to the comfort of Christ.

Andy reflects, “These shootings—even difficulty in general—are a bridge to talking about Jesus. There’s a reality our students would relate to. They have witnessed death, and experienced the pain of loss and grief. Such events make the gospel more tangible. Some of our college students have experienced great loss. But for many of them, this tragedy is the first they’ve known, giving them opportunity to connect with the gospel, with Christ, with forgiveness.”
Our humanity always seeks the meaning behind events, especially tragic ones. Some Jews once told Jesus about Galileans whose blood had been mixed with sacrifices, as if demanding that he  declare the purpose behind these deaths (Luke 13:1). Jesus’ contextualized response is, rather, a call for repentance (Luke 13:5).

EXPANDING OUR VIEW OF TRAGEDY
Ample evidence points to the narrowness of our interpretation of tragic events, as seen in our too-often presumptive narrowing of God’s purposes. While there are times when tragedy, suffering, and hardship may well be God’s judgment upon a specific sin or city or nation, a host of biblical passages provides reason to believe that he may have other purposes in mind. In John 9, the disciples saw a man blind from birth and asked, “Who sinned, this man or his parents that he was born blind?” They, like we, naturally assumed that all tragedy was judgment.

Jesus expands their understanding by saying, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned . . . but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him” (John 9:4). Furthermore, Jesus himself expressed a wide range of responses to loss, suffering, hardship, and tragedy: he cried, was encouraging, rebuked, forgave, and restored. Jesus’ responses are, in musical terms, harmonic.

RUF VT Group at Summer Conference, 2012

Many times, the human response to such things is monotonic, as in the days following the April 2011 tornado that ravaged much of Alabama. Some pastors (of varying denominational affiliations) declared that the tornado was God’s judgment upon the area after the repeal of Blue Laws in Tuscaloosa a few months earlier.     

By comparison, the biblical explanation of tragedy, suffering, and the like is much broader. Joseph’s explanation for his suffering was that “God meant it for good” (Gen. 50:20). The apostle Paul says that such events can have the purpose of providing the opportunity to experience divine comfort, elicit prayer, provoke generosity, and fill up the sufferings of Christ, to name just a few. Whereas our initial response to tragedy often sounds like  “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” played with one finger on the piano, the biblical response is more like Mozart’s Requiem. The purposes of God are surely both as broad and as specific as the lives they impact. For many, these purposes include repentance unto life.

SEEING GRACE
Andy tells about one girl who became a Christian after the April 2006 shooting. She later wrote, “The Lord chose to use the deaths of 32 to bring me to a place where I could accept the death and resurrection of one, and for that I’ll never forget.”

Andy says, “That isn’t unique, that the Lord would use tragedy to bring people to himself, even personal tragedies. This year, we had a student whose mother’s house burned down. We got to walk through that with her.” And look to God for answers to otherwise unanswerable questions.
The challenge for us all—particularly for pastors—is to know when to speak for God and when, in human frailty, not to. Perhaps the greatest damage is done when one presumes to speak for God and shouldn’t, and when one—by nature of the pastoral office—should, but doesn’t.
Andy is completing his first year as an RUF minister at Virginia Tech, after 6 years as an assistant pastor at Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Raleigh, North Carolina. He is also a 1999 graduate of the school. Currently, about 80 students attend RUF, but Andy is thankful for the large freshman class.

Regarding the many one-on-one meetings that he and RUF intern Mary Katherine Dempsey have with those students, and the five small groups that also meet, Andy says, “We’re excited about seeing the gospel expand on campus.”

He concludes, “I’m thankful that the PCA loves college students enough to put us in places like this so we can walk with them  and bring the gospel to bear in the midst of such experiences.” 

See the Summer 2012 issue of Covenant magazine to read how RUF campus ministers Chad Brewer, Ryan Moore, and Lanier Wood have dealt with personal and community tragedies in their lives and ministries.

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Seeing People Pastorally

“What Troy Chatham was was my business…because I did not want to be what he was, and that was no sure thing. It was a fearful thing to be like him. But what I saw, walking up that dark road, was that it would also be a fearful thing to be unlike him. I saw that I had to try to become a man unimaginable to Troy Chatham, a man he could not imagine raising his hand to with the thumb and forefinger circled—but to do that I would have to become a man yet unimaginable to myself.” Jayber Crow, 241
“You were in High School with me,” I want to say to the familiar-looking stranger; only I’m not really sure. Maybe it was her. Maybe it wasn’t. I hadn’t paid that close attention.

Robert Frost “passed by the watchman on his beat” and dropped his eyes “unwilling to explain” (Acquainted with the Night). Jayber Crow hid “behind a tree or [lay] down in the weeds” (240). But both of them had legitimate reasons for their inattentiveness. Jayber was mostly drunk and Frost, for his part, was out roaming past the hour of all upstanding- and most reasonable-people. As for me, I did not know if this woman was my old classmate or not because I had spent those years looking away from her and so many other people to pass silent judgment upon assumed excesses of debauchery.

There are those who see people and those that don’t. I like to think I’m the former. I’m not.

I’m not alone. The disciples didn’t see a person: they saw a moral dilemma: “…who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” (John 9: 2). The neighbors didn’t see a person. In fact, there was some debate whether he was or not “the man who used to sit and beg.” The Pharisees didn’t see a person who had, undoubtedly, sat in very public places during much of his blind life. Or put it to question: how can church leaders in a tight knit community pass a man for decades and then not be sure of his identity a few days later?

There is the possibility that seeing him out of context threw them for a loop. Or maybe the man, realizing his disheveled appearance—after all, he could see himself for the first time—cleaned up by combing his beard and washing his face.

But I am convinced that almost nobody recognized him because they never really saw him. Oh, they saw a shell of a human judged so decisively that his or his parent’s sin was just assumed. They saw a creature to be despised, neglected, maybe pitied; but not to be looked at. After all, his neighbors and the Pharisees couldn’t pick him out of a line-up of one—despite his repeated confessions, “I am the man.”

Jesus saw him. Jesus—the one who saw people: not a problem to fix, a social construct to revise, a political problem, an evangelistic opportunity, or the presumed or real sin committed. Jesus just saw a man. That’s because Jesus saw people: he saw the woman at the well, the mother who lost her only son, the 10 lepers. And the disciples—he saw their fish-mongering, petty, tax-collecting selves too.

And he loved them. He said, “Come. Follow me.”

I see people, I tell Jesus. He nods: “You see them… as opportunities for advancement, hindrances to efficiency, interruptions to accomplishments, and projects of proselytization; beauty to admire, ugliness to avoid, intelligence to inspire, or ignorance to despise.” It’s then I realize that I don’t see people. I see all the wrong things. I too am blind.

I have heard this passage preached many times. Always, it is the emphasis of the miracle and how it points to spiritual blindness of humanity. Yes, Jesus did a great miracle, which is something that we cannot imitate. But I see now he did more than one. He saw what many of us don’t: he saw people. And that is something I can do. When my eyes are opened, I too can see people.

Even Jayber eventually saw people differently, specifically Troy. At the end of the story, Jayber is watching Troy with a shadowed contempt. Jayber then reflects:

“At the clap of that condemnation of my thoughts, what had happened to [Troy] seemed to happen to me, and for the first time I saw him apart from my contempt for him. I saw him clear-eyed. I saw us both as if from a great distance off in time: two small carved, suffering creatures, soon to be gone. Troy was a beaten man and knew it, and was trying not to know it. You could see it in his eyes… So there he was, a man who had been giving everything and did not know it, who had lost it all and now knew it, and who was boasting and grinning only to pretend for a few hours longer that he did not know it. He was an exhausted man on the way back, not to the nothing that he had when he started out, but to the nothing that everything had been created from—and so, I pray, to mercy.

And there I was, a man losing what I was never given, a man yet rich with love, a man whose knees were weakening against gravity, who needed to go somewhere and lie down. I stood facing that man I had hated for forty years, and I did not hate him. If he had acknowledged then what he finally would not be able to avoid acknowledging, I would have hugged him. If I could have done it, I would have liked to pick him up like a child and carry him to some place of safety and calm” (360-362).

Lord, let me see people.

Joel Hathaway
Covenant Theological Seminary
Director of Alumni & Career Services

Encouraging the Patience of Pastors

The small, grass-filled space seems barely large enough to hold a three story building. I’m talking about the spot where the old administration building once stood. Besides that, the grass has so effectively grown thick and green that newcomers might imagine the lot has always stood empty. That is, except for one strip of bare ground—narrow but long—which, despite Eric Kessels’ best efforts, has utterly rejected seed, water, and fertilizer: a despoiled, barren line.

It is not random, that strip of ground. The rear sidewalk used to lie along that path. Ironic, perplexing even, that a multi-ton building can stand on a spot for 50 years, and yet three years later the ground has so completely healed that grass freely grows. But the ground beneath a strip of cement—two and a half feet wide and some thirty feet long, two inches thick—after the same lengths of time, is still scarred. The principle is reinforced that the burdens of world once un-shouldered may leave little mark; but, the places where the careless trampling of relationships have worn us bare may never (or only very-slowly) heal.

This is the pastor’s narrative—that fruit may fruitful grow widely in innumerable places, and yet some lives will for years reflect the brokenness of their stories even more than the application of grace to those tempered scars. Some men will remain gruff. Some women will appear bitter. Some children will express disdain. Some pastors will lament dismay.

A Problem of Prolific Velocity
What makes the soil of that one spot resistant to growth is not an aftereffect of the weight of the cement—insignificant compared to the building itself. But 50 years of stamping, traipsing, marching, walking, and running feet have so compressed the soil beneath the cement with such concerted repetition that it remains barren.

Such is always the effect of repeated relational injury. Our songs reflect as much. John Gorka sang, “I don’t feel like a train anymore, I feel like the tracks.” A poem I wrote several years ago began,

Too long the desires of the world have traveled through my garden lot,
and trampled down the flowers planted, broken limbs and every pot,
left worn the ways meant for grass, left bare the places saved for life
and made a joke of Godly peace, and made a home of trouble strife.

Most telling, and most famous, are these words Lee Hazelwood wrote and Nancy Sinatra sang:

You keep saying you've got something for me.
something you call love, but confess.
You've been messin' where you shouldn't have been a messin'
and now someone else is gettin' all your best.
These boots are made for walking, and that's just what they'll do
one of these days these boots are gonna walk all over you.

Kind of says it all, doesn’t it? When people walk on us, it does more damage than the weight of a building just resting on our backs. The problem with adding speed to mass is that much less does more damage.

Once Upon a Pastorate
Jeff (not his name) emailed this week: “A transition to a different church is not out of the question for me.” After further conversation, he confessed that his feelings of neglect and marginalization were the result of fear, specifically the senior pastor’s fear that Jeff was actually being effective. The senior pastor has faced challenge upon challenge—theologically, pastorally, to leadership, to orthodoxy, to his person—and he’s tired. He’s an old, barren, dry stretch of ground beside a field of summer wheat. Jeff has been in the church for eight months.

Chris (not his name) emailed in January as he was departing another church. After six months into the call, he began to clarify the church’s vision for themselves in that community. Not seeing one, he presented, defended, and began implementing a vision. The church has had several pastors who came to town, began implementing their vision—with little or no real knowledge of and even less relational capital in the community. Needless to say, this pastor-church relationship ended badly.

The fruit of the Spirit is…Patience
I would argue that most ministry leaders struggle most with patience. It is downright, earth-grinding, soul-wrenching, blood-letting, tear-inducing, exhausting to minster to a person who seems, despite our every effort, resistant. And we grow impatient.

There is a place for shaking off dust and calling down woes, but in my experience it is many years down the road from when we actually give up being patient. We love talking about Jesus’ three years with his disciples as if that’s the standard: three years, and I’m out of here. Let’s suppose that Jesus spent 5 days a week with his disciples; some were married and others had jobs, so we have to assume there were times they weren't with him. Five days a week, say eight hours of waking time, for three years is roughly 780 days or 6,240 hours. If ministry leaders are honest with themselves, their time with a congregation amounts to two hours on Sunday, an hour midweek, and an hour for a one-on-one lunch: four hours a week. At that rate it would take 1,560 weeks, or 30 years, to have the same exposure to their people. The same people they are often so quick to give up on.

Even after some 6,240 hours, Jesus looked across the dirty stretch of road at his disciples and said, “I have to die” (Mark 9:31). And they “did not understand what he meant.” In fact, “they were afraid to ask him about it” so they decide to debate which of them “was the greatest” (Mark 9:32-36). Jesus didn’t give up. He taught us patience.

Celebrating the Long Road
Hard ground makes us cynical. How many people have been condemned to hell by men—only to be saved to heaven by God—through prayers that lambast their fruitlessness? Surveying the fruitless tree, the master said, “For three years now I’ve been coming to look for fruit on this fit tree and haven’t found any. Cut it down! Why should it use up the soil?”

“Sir,” the man replied, “Leave it alone for one more year, and I’ll dig around it and fertilize it. If it bears fruit near year, fine! IF not, then cut it down.” (Luke 9:6-8).

I find it interesting that this section of scripture is often called “Repent or Perish.” Yes, that’s there, but couldn’t this parable also be called, “One more year.” One more year! That’s the cry of the patient farmer, the patient parent, the patient pastor. One more year, Lord. One more year to minister to this man, that woman, to reach that child, to love that lonely widow, to shepherd that angry father. One more year! It’s the cry that celebrates the long road of faithful ministry to those places where the traipsing feet of harsh relationships have stamped out any human hope of growth, but answers in the night with, “One more year, Lord. One more year.”

Waiting for Grace (or Grass)
Eric Kessels hasn’t given up. He or one of his grounds crew is weekly out watering and fertilizing, aerating or over-seeding the entire lot where the old administration building used to stand. He hasn’t given up on that thin stretch of sidewalk-compressed soil. He is patient—crying in his actions, “One more year”—as he labors on what, to now, appears fruitlessness. But patience, and time, and faithfulness may yet well tell another story.

May it for you as well.

Joel Hathaway is the Director of Alumni and Career Services for Covenant Seminary, where he spends most of his time working with recent graduates and ministry leaders in their first five years of ministry.

Reflections on Jerram Barr’s Introduction to and Viewing of Wit

“You cannot imagine how time can be so still. It hangs. It weighs. And yet there is so little of it. It goes so slowly. And yet it is so scarce.” (Vivian Bearing, Wit)

Last night, in a small, dimly lighted theater in Frontenac, Jerram Barrs introduced the movie Wit (referral link). The audience consisted of 20 Covenant Theological Seminary board members, a dozen faculty and staff, and as many students and alumni.

Wit is a film about Vivian Bearing (Emma Thompson), a professor of John Donne’s 17th Century poetry. The film begins with the announcement that she has cancer, and the story follows the remainder of her days. Vivian’s character development, intellectual assent and physical decline, center on the poem by Donne, “Death Be Not Proud.”

Jerram commented as introduction, “The poem by Donne is [perceived] a paradox, but not really. It sounds like a paradox, but for the Christian it is the ushering into glory. It’s harrowing. Be prepared to be moved, dealing with questions of death and suffering.”

The Film
The very first words of the film, spoken by Dr. Harvey Kelekian, are, “You have cancer.” No name. No recognition of the human element under duress of the “insidious…treacherous” news of cancer: just the mechanical diagnosis of disease. This inhuman treatment, developed throughout the film in the behavior of most every doctor (most of them males), stands in direct contrast to the treatment of two women: a nurse, Susie Monahan, and Vivian’s professor, Evelyn Ashford. It is just one of the many demonstrative paradoxes that graphically illustrate the tension of Donne’s poem.

Kelekian and research assistant, Jason Posner—referred to largely as Jason—are painstakingly deliberate in their careless treatment of Vivian as a human being. And yet, they are the characters most reduced in their own humanity: singularly focused, shallow, and trapped in cause-effect thinking. This is further illustrated by the fact that, after the first appearance of each, they are almost universally referred to as “Kelekian and Jason”: two men not even worthy of having full names.

Jason, meaning “healer” in Greek, is anything but that. His bedside manner is nonexistent. He is crass, abrupt, and intrusive. At one point he bluntly states, “There’s a whole course on [bedside manner] in med school. It’s required. Colossal waste of time for researchers.”

Knowledge versus Meaning
For her part, Vivian stands between two poles of great magnitude. On the one side, her own lonely cynicism in Donne’s “paradox” finds voice in the person of Dr. Kelekian. To call him stoic or emotionless is inaccurate; he lacks compassion, but then seems to take great delight in urging Vivian on toward “the full dose,” with a pat and a feigned smile. On the other side is Vivian’s own professor, Evelyn Ashford—a woman who, in the words of Jerram, “gets it. She understands Donne’s faith in a way that Vivian never gets…until the end.”

The call of both is pronounced:

Kelekian: This treatment is the strongest thing we have to offer you. And as research it’ll make a significant contribution to our knowledge… The important thing is for you to take the full dose of chemotherapy… we've got to go full force.
Ashford: The standards of scholarship and critical reading which one would apply to any other text are simply insufficient. The effort must be total for the results to be meaning.

Kelekian offers knowledge. It’s tempting. Vivian echoes the offering, “Knowledge. Yes.” It’s the lie of Satan, to discover the cold, isolated fact of some unknown quantity apart from relationship, apart from reality, apart from God. Knowledge—scientifically constrained and pragmatically analyzed. Jason the “healer” sees the knowledge. For him, cancer is “awesome… the only thing I ever wanted.” The word choice is particular: not, the only thing I ever wanted to study. Simply, “Cancer’s the only thing I ever wanted.” Jason chooses knowledge.

Ashford, for her part, offers meaning, and Vivian chooses it. Her reflections that take her back to childhood and the classroom, to moments of joy and those of harshness, serve as moments of self-realization. Even as her body dies, her mind grows: reflective, longing, regretful, wistful, reminiscent. As she does, she grows more honest, “I don’t feel so sure of myself anymore... I used to feel sure.” Meaning will always win the day for those who look for why within the what.

Knowledge is hermetic. Meaning is contextual. Knowledge demands no relationship. Meaning depends upon it. Knowledge asks only what; meaning must seek why.

Why...hope?
So far as I can remember, the word hope is used but once throughout the film. Kelekian flippantly tosses the word to Vivian as she is first taking in her condition: “You just have to hope.” And yet the only real hope is presented, paradoxically—not through science, nor research, nor through doctors, nor medicine, nor “the full dose”—but through the words a of child’s book. Evelyn Ashford crawls up into bed with the now-dying Vivian and reads to her from The Runaway Bunny (referral link). At one point she pauses and proclaims, “Look at that. A little allegory of the soul. Wherever it hides, God will find it. See, Vivian?”

Vivian does see—for after the passing of her mortal flesh into the darkness that is that initial shroud of death, her voice rises again in the words of Donne:

Death be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not so,
For, those, whom thou think'st, thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee,
Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee doe goe,
Rest of their bones, and soules deliverie.
Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poyson, warre, and sicknesse dwell,
And poppie, or charmes can make us sleepe as well,
And better then thy stroake; why swell'st thou then;
One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally,
And death shall be no more…(comma) death, thou shalt die.

Jerram Barrs is Professor of Christian Studies and Contemporary Culture at Covenant Theological Seminary. He is also the Resident Scholar of the Francis A. Schaeffer Institute. He is the author of several books, including “Learning Evangelism from Jesus” (referral link) which won Outreach Magazine’s book of the year award in 2010.

Mr. Joel Hathaway
Director of Alumni and Career Services
Covenant Theological Seminary

Covenant Seminary Alumni Devotional: Helpless and Omnipotent

(Meditations on John 1, Col 1, Heb 1. )
Jesus, as a baby in His mother’s arms, looked so helpless, so non-threatening. When He was born, He was a mess. Having just passed through the birth canal, His head and face were swollen, He was covered in blood and water, and He struggled to catch his first breath. Mary and Joseph cleaned Him up with water that likely wasn’t very sterile but was all they could get in a stable; and Mary held Him close to her chest to warm Him and protect Him from the cold night air. Later that night when he woke hungry, she feed Him in the manner that mothers do.

As a newborn human baby in which the Son of God is clothed, He looked so helpless. But as the divine Son of God, He was actually holding every molecule of Mary’s body together. Her every breath was a gift from Him. He sustained her, even as she sustained Him. The star, the place, all of the universe, and scripture’s fulfillment, were and are held together under His divine control.
Fast forward 33 years, His mother can hardly look upon her son; so swollen, bloodied, hanging limp from 3 nails pinning Him to a cross. He had just struggled to take His last breath and announce the completion of the contract between the Creator and the Created. He looks so helpless this time too. Within the hour, word comes from Pilate that two men have asked for His body, and the death certificate is written with the point of a spear pushed up into his chest and more blood and water. It is what He came to do for us out of obedience to the Father, love for us, and the “joy set before Him.” In His humanity, He looked so helpless. In His divinity, He held together every molecule of His few friends and many enemies gathered around Him. Every breath they breathed to cry or to curse was a gift from Him. He sustained them even as His enemies killed Him. The storm, the torn curtain, all of the universe, and scriptures’ incredible fulfillment, were and are held together under His divine control.

Three days later the Divine and the Human are re-united as the One who laid down His life, took it up again. He sprung the surprise on His followers to their delight like a child opening a Christmas present under the tree, but better. He came back to them bearing the marks on His body, a smile on His face, and hope for their eternal future.

And He offers these to us, also, this Christmas. Have you loved and thanked Him?

Covenant Seminary Alumnus
Mike Mahlbacher (MDiv '95)
Louisville, KY

Covenant Theological Seminary Alumna Named CIU Alumna of the year

Covenant Seminary alumna, Wilma Cross (MATS '71) was named Columbia International University's almna of the year. An article by Katie Weaver notes that, "In early November, Columbia International University (CIU) in Columbia, S.C., hosted its homecoming ceremonies, which included a special assembly to honor distinguished alumni for outstanding work in areas of mission and ministry. The 2011 Alumna of the Year Award went to Wilma Cross, a 1969 CIU graduate who has since dedicated her life to, as she says, 'knowing God and making Him known.'

Miss Cross serves with Youth With a Mission (YWAM) in Chile. After graduation and a few years on-staff at McLean Presbyterian Church, Miss Cross joined World Presbyterian Missions (precursor to Mission to the World). She was assigned to the WPM’s Bible Institute in Chile, and she taught there for nine years. During that time, Weaver reports, Miss Cross "felt called to mercy ministries and in 1979 began a Bible study with the women in Santiago’s Quillota prison. She eventually established Chile’s first evangelical prison ministry and became an officially recognized chaplain in women’s prisons."

You can read the full article here. You can read more about Wilma here (about halfway down the page).

A Crisis of Competence

(by Covenant Seminary alumnus Rev. Tom Stein)

How do you live when all is new?
The axiom is correct: we live in a world of change. Sometimes you seek change, and sometimes change seeks you. Soon all is new. What do you do? As I reflect upon this year, I realize I have been the sought. I did not seek change, but change found me, and now all is new – especially in the work I do.

The people are new. The organization is new. The computer and its operating system are new. The copier is new. The processes and procedures are new. My new cry is, “I take 10 minutes to complete a 30-second task.” It is humbling and sometimes humiliating. The people who know the system do not always remember your newness, so they wonder, “Does he have any sense?”

I wonder, too. In my former calling as a pastor, I achieved a level of competence. God willjudge my effectiveness or excellence, but in the old days, I needed only 10 minutes to complete each 10-minute task.

So how do I survive and serve, when all is new?
I begin by reciting the words of Nebuchadnezzar, after his humbling and humiliation: “He does as he pleases with the powers of heaven and the peoples of the earth” (Daniel 4:35). This newness is His pleasure, even when it is befuddling to me. I must recall this again and again, when this crisis of competence becomes a crisis of confidence.

I continue by rejoicing in the words of Paul to the Romans: “We have different gifts, according to the grace given us” (Romans 12:6). For some reason, someone in this new place sees or senses gifts in me. In a broken world, my gifts will never perfectly match my calling. But when He calls, He has equipped, and He will equip.

Finally, I learn to live what I have taught: all I do, I do in the name of Jesus, and for the sake of Jesus (Colossians 3:17). Change mystifies. Change disorients. Change hurts. Even when you seek it, it exacts a steep price upon body and spirit. But I bumble on and fumble ahead, offering myself anew each day, asking the Lord to make me competent in my work, and confident in Him.

Rev. Tom Stein (MDiv '91)
Director of Alumni, Geneva College
Beaver Falls, PA