Читать книгу Look—I Am With You - Dale Goldsmith - Страница 7

You are a Christian in college. College—public or private, state-supported or even church-related—can be a thoroughly secular, worldly place. That means that your Christian faith plays little role in most of what goes on at your school. It will mean that your college experience will present you with a lot of challenges to that faith. Some are challenges you would face anywhere—back at home, in the workplace, in the military. Others are unique to the college experience.

Some might think that their faith can take a vacation while they are in school. Christians know that the opposite is the case. In fact, considering what goes on in college, your faith needs more fuel in college than perhaps in any other environment. Why? Because you are constantly being confronted with new ideas, new facts, new theories to explain the new facts, new criticisms of all the theories. And new experiences. And new people. This is a busy time for your brain. And your thinking is connected closely to your faith and both are connected to how you live.

All of this comes at you pretty fast; and on a daily basis. And the new authorities—like teachers, books, and even roommates—are a constant presence. Which among all those authorities that clamor for your ear are you going to follow? Or will your primary authority figure be the Lord Jesus Christ? Will your primary authority source be Scripture?

As a Christian you expect to listen to Jesus and follow him in discipleship. Disciples need regular practice to develop their discipleship. Like an athlete or musician, you need regular practice that is rigorous, focuses on fundamentals, and constantly seeks improvement. Christian discipleship doesn’t impose one strict pattern on everyone. Each one will nurture the unique gifts God has given—including what you are gaining from your college experience. So this is not the time to take a vacation from the Christian faith and wait to pick it up again . . . later.

Later? “Later” is when your intense exposure to all of the new college experiences will slow down. “Later” is when you will have already met that person with whom you hope to spend the rest of your life. “Later” is when you will have already picked a life’s work and gotten prepared for it. “Later” happens after some of the biggest decisions of your life are already made. Can you afford to wait until “later” when some of your most decisive thinking is happening now?

So college is intense and will be challenging. The best resource for you as a Christian is Jesus Christ and you come closest to him through Scripture. But how does that work to help you in college? You probably don’t envision yourself starting at the beginning of Genesis and reading until you find a passage that speaks to you about your roommate, time management, how old the universe is, or what to do on a date. But Scripture was written by and for Christians who were being challenged where they were, trying to live their faith in what was a relatively hostile external environment (the Roman Empire) and often a chaotic internal environment (disagreement among Christians about what the new faith meant).

While it is true that the New Testament writers did not attend college as you know it, they certainly did know a lot about the kinds of problems that occur on the college campus: intellectual challenges to the faith, conflict, pride, failure, questions of fairness and justice, getting along with others, sex, alcohol. What if you wanted to interact directly with those writers and could learn how they dealt with similar problems? What if some of those New Testament authors could be quizzed about their understanding of college-type problems and were asked for solutions to some of those issues? The results could be useful in terms of both analysis (of the college experience) and support (for you while you are experiencing it).

Each meditation in this book invites you to a conversation with the first-century Christian who authored the portion of Scripture printed at the top of each page. You have your story (who you are, what you are doing in college, where you are heading) and the biblical writers have their own faith story that informs what they write in their letters. Why were these four biblical texts used as the basis for the following meditations chosen and who is the Jesus you will encounter in each of them?

Colossians is a letter of St. Paul the Apostle to a church of Christians in what is today central Turkey. Those folks were honestly seeking to live their lives based on, and in accord with, Jesus Christ, and they wanted to make sure they had all their bases covered. The Paul-Colossian dialogue provides a positive, Christian understanding for someone with a vocation to be a theologically focused college student. It introduces a Jesus who is cosmic in creativity yet who still will make sense of things for you on a personal level.

The Gospel According to Matthew offers the complete picture of this Jesus who is so grandly described in Colossians. And it is the one of the four Gospels that particularly offers a Christology—a title or nickname or summary explaining some particularly important aspect of Jesus—that is most appropriate for your situation: Jesus the Teacher. Perfect!

Then First Corinthians. Things were not always sweetness and light in the early church. At Corinth they were particularly messy: conflicts, schisms, misbehavior, selfishness, pride, sexual deviance, overindulgence. (Almost begins to sound like life on some college campuses, doesn’t it?) When Christians began to invent the church a lot of things needed attention. This letter can function for you as a kind of first-century preview of the academic life. But in this letter St. Paul offers a concrete and powerful focus to generate appropriate faithful responses to the various errors embraced by the Corinthians: the crucified Christ.

Finally, First Peter readjusts its readers’ self-identity: they are “exiles”; and First Peter points out that Jesus provided both the model and the strength for you to follow in Jesus’ “footsteps” as you finish your tenure as a student in the college experience and prepare to set out on the new phase of your vocation as a faithful Christian, seeking to be obedient and to find justice in following Christ who himself was an “exile.”

May your story be strengthened by engagement with the stories and struggles these early texts offer. May your story be one that you write faithfully, nourished by those who have gone before and by the community of those to whom you are vitally connected through Christ in his body, the church. You’ve got messages; let’s see what they’re about.

Dale Goldsmith

Amarillo, Texas

August 1, 2015