Alright, I'm actually up because my stomach hurts, and I couldn't sleep anyways. It hasn't done this in a year and I've lost all my coping strategies...yes, a year! Isn't it crazy? November is my ebenezer month, in more ways than one...but that is a different conversation. Which will happen before or around Thanksgiving, I promise.
-- God is just so sweet, though! I have to say something...He's given me so much good this year. I've met many, many good people, iron-on-iron people, and then a couple of crazy people of the sort you have to keep -- you know what I mean. They are the ones who you find on a bus you walked onto by accident, the ones who you meet for coffee the next day for largely indefinable reasons. And in the middle of the second or third hour of conversation, they say something that makes you glance over quickly, skeptically, because you've been waiting forever for someone else to say that. Those people. Reasonably, we only come across a handful of those people our entire lives, and I've met a few this year, and always when I needed them. God most definitely loves us through people.
But that's another post! I'll stop now... :)
And I'm starting to tire out. So by way of summary --
Lately I've been pondering just how vocal I should be -- perhaps the lack of belligerent professors this semester has given me a little bit more distance to think. But when is it necessary to put a word in for truth, and where would I do no good and only come across as another pugnacious Christian? (I'm always surprised at their numbers and tenacity, actually...and their acute lack of love. A rant for another night.) More specifically...
I have been a faithful reader of the USI Shield since last January. It makes me feel more connected to the culture of the campus, yes, but I think I've started this new habit chiefly as a twisted, autophobic way of motivating myself in my English studies. By the time I've sloughed through the whole thing and shaken the remains of the grammatical bloodbath from my feet, I feel that it is practically my moral duty to become an English teacher, or at least circulate more coherent prose. (I don't mean to sound condescending -- the Shield has made great improvements over the past semester, expanding their content and columnists, and they do offer an accurate cross-section of USI -- they just have no grammar Nazis on staff.) I've debated writing to the editor before over some very silly opinion pieces, but an article of an entirely different nature popped up yesterday and I don't know what to do with it.
Essentially, it's a critique of a lecture series on creationism that a campus ministry, Chi Alpha, hosted over the past two months. The article is from a staff writer, highly factually inaccurate, and poorly and nastily written. (I can tack up the text if anyone wants to read it.) Part two of the article will be published next Thursday, and it may moderate this week's installment, but still -- should I write in anything? Since this is the Midwest, I imagine the Shield will receive multiple letters about these articles -- the argument itself is inevitable. But should I say something, and argue well in the firestorm, or stay out of it entirely? When am I talking for the sake of doing some good, and when am I just snapping back in offense?
Motives are so hard to decipher. (Does anyone else struggle with that?) I've been poking at mine concerning a few big decisions over the past month, and I finally came to a truce -- if I'm bathing it in prayer and constantly dialogging with the Spirit, it's alright to move ahead and do things that I know are inherently good, even if I might have selfish reasons tacked onto them. I will never know exactly what my heart wants; it's a petulant, mad mess, prone to change its mind the minute I have pinned it down. And it's hard to fix, or reason into behaving. But it is possible to just tie it to the Word and make it follow along, and then life becomes much simpler.
...it's now 3:30. I do have to work tomorrow, so I think I've written enough for tonight. It's nice to be scribbling again. :) I'll be back soon...I need to explain a few things, a few of the crazy things I love that I've been scaring everyone with lately. 'Til then.
I have been young, and now am old, yet I have not seen the righteous forsaken, or his children begging for bread.
Psalm 37:25
Life is good, but God is better. :)
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