SojournBU Being Awesome

As college students recover and discover the good news of Jesus we hope that they begin to shape their whole lives in response. This looks like everything from inviting friends to events, to stepping into roles of servanthood and leadership, to investing in neighborhoods and causes that help increase shalom in the world.

One of our students at BU, Stefi, has been responding to good news in this very way this semester. I had the opportunity to brag on her a bit in my last teaching at REUNION. The short story is that she read the book Half the Sky (also hugely influential on Amy and her decision to practice to women’s health physical therapy), and wanted to get more involved in efforts to combat the trafficking of women (especially for sexual exploitation). She has become an ambassador for Amirah Boston (you can also hear more about this in my REUNION teaching).

Stefi invited the BU crew to Amirah’s celebration dinner and it was a privilege to be included in this night of hearing stories of how God is at work bringing rescue and restoration to women through Amirah’s work (and the work of volunteers like Stefi). Good stuff!

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Leonard Cohen On “Hallelujah”

From a fascinating article about Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah:

“This world is full of conflicts and full of things that cannot be reconciled, but there are moments when we can transcend the dualistic system and reconcile and embrace the whole mess, and that’s what I mean by ‘Hallelujah.’ That regardless of what the impossibility of the situation is, there is a moment when you open your mouth and you throw open your arms and you embrace the thing and you just say, ‘Hallelujah! Blessed is the name.'”

The Gospel According To Brady Quinn

Before reading this post, click here and watch the video on the page (also read the quote by William Deresiewicz, it is excellent).

It is rare to see a professional athlete (or any public figure) quite this candid. And I think what Brady Quinn has to say is important as well as profound.

I ride public transportation every day and there are times, more often than not, where every single person in my train car is flipping their way through a phone or an iPad.

I am not anti-tech, I am not anti-iphones, I’m not anti-facebook. I think these are mainly presenting issues of a deeper problem.

More and more I realize how profoundly messed up most people’s experience of family has been, and how poor we are as a culture at understanding community.

We live in a me-first, achievement driven, I-get-the-last-word-on-my-life world. Families, healthy ones anyway, don’t work like that. Healthy families work on a group first, team focused, someone-else-gets-the-last-word ethos.

Which brings me back to Quinn’s thoughts. We need to be better at actually caring for people…at asking hard questions of each other…at expecting hard questions to be asked of us (and looking for someone to do so if we don’t have that in place)…at submitting…at being a part of a group (at the expense of our own personal gain or comfort)…at considering others more important than ourselves.

I will never forget a conversation I once had with a student. They told me they needed me to give them 1,000,000 bits of positive feedback for every 1 bit of “criticism.” There’s a truth there: we need more positive affirmation than negative.

But there is an underlying current of avoidance of hard stuff in our culture: hard conversations, hard truth, hard work. I know this makes me sound like an old man, but I think it is true, and I think this lies at the heart of Quinn’s post-game thoughts.

Which leads me to a final thought: the best things in life always come through working through something hard. Grace is a free gift, and that is beautiful, but the working out of our salvation is not an easy job. It is a worthwhile fight…a difficult effort, a long obedience, that is truly good in every sense of the word.

I’ll end with this from Norman MacLean (author of “A River Runs Through It”): “All good things come by grace and grace comes through art and art does not come easy.”

Consumer Quotes

Given that Advent Conspiracy is upon us, here are a couple of quotes to ponder:

“The commercialization of [Christmas] does not exemplify the secularization of society as is commonly assumed. Rather than a secular corruption of a Christian feast, the consumer activity around Christmas functions as the high holy day of a completely different religion, one centered on a consumer culture.” – Dell de Chant

And:

“The people who are rebelling meaningfully don’t buy a lot of stuff.” – David Foster Wallace

Pray to Stay Awake

Over the years I have had times where it has been difficult to fall asleep. Not full on insomnia, but definitely long nights laying in bed wishing I was sleeping.

I prayed to help me fall asleep. Not because I am super spiritual and wanted to redeem the time. No, praying actually lulled me to sleep. Which has always made feel sort of bad.

But now I get up in the middle of night, every night, and sometimes I’m up for a while. My daughter seems to fall asleep best when she is walked. I walk around the house with her for 20-30 minutes until she is succumbs to deep slumber.

And I pray during those walks. Ironically, because it helps me stay awake now.

But also I sense the need to pray more regardless of sleep or no sleep. There are some big things to process through and some big dreams I/we have about the future. As a staff we reflected on this this week, and so I will continue to work on prayer even when it is not helping me stay awake or fall asleep.