August 12, 2005
What God Has Been Doing in My Life Lately, Part III
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I left off talking about the fall semester of Fall 2003, the semester where I was not a full-time student, but I was writing my SIP on "Thomas Reid and the Epistemology of Testimony," raising support money to go to Trnava, Slovakia and work at "The Building," acting in "Sabrina Fair", and working for Chartwells Food Service.
A few things stick out to me about this time in my life.
First off, I wasnt incredibly successful at raising money for my trip to Slovakia. I just dont click real well with the traditional style of support raising that exists in the church today for short term missions. You have to write letters to friends and relatives that you havent communicated with in years, and pretend that you are really writing them so that they will pray for you and be informed about your desire for ministry, but you just cant get around the fact that you surely would not have sent them a letter unless you needed money from them. It was a very uncomfortable process for me, and I allowed myself to be talked into sending support letters to people on my dad's side of the family that I never talk to anymore just to get money out of them. I still kind of regret that.
I'm also not very well connected to a support-raising base, like some people my age who have spent years getting donors from various mission trips they have gone on. So I was getting kind of frustrated as I watched my considerably minimal support needs come in even more considerably slow.
I did receive some blessing from this process though. The biggest blessing for me was that certain members at Rock Creek, who really didn't know me that well, stepped forward to support me. Their support for me and for my family really tied me closer to the church at that time. I think particularly of Allen and Sharon Duble who showed a lot of interest in my trip when I hadnt even really reached out to them that much to seek out their interest.
In the end though, I wouldnt raise enough money to go to Slovakia. But the Lord sent another source of income, which at the time I saw as a strange but sure miraculous provision of God. One night, while turning left onto Ochs Highway, the highway that leads up Lookout Mountain, a driver who was speeding down the mountain slammed into my left side as I was making the turn (I was pulling out and he came suddenly aroung a curve; my instant reaction was to break and hope that he could break as well but he was going too fast and couldn't stop in time). I was miraculously protected and also miraculously provided with insurance money to pay for my totaled car. The other driver was completely faulted for the accident. I decided to use some of the insurance money to finance my trip to Slovakia. The Lord works in mysterious ways.
Another thing that sticks out to me about that time was the development of a relationship with my pastor Eric Youngblood. He would make frequent visits to see me, meeting me often up at Covenant College after I would finish my shift at Chartwells. We would sometimes meet on the Overlook while I was still in my work uniform. We talked about a lot of things during that time, and I told him a lot about myself. I had gone to a lot of counselors when I was younger and I had grown kind of sick of dumping my problems on people. But Eric had a natural way of listening and advising that made me trust him immediately. I began to work on things in my life and heart that I had avoided for a long time. I began to pray about things that I had not even dared to pray about before. We talked about Slovakia and my hopes for what I would do after I returned. I told him I would like to come back to Chattanooga for a while and that I wanted to be more involved in the church and to do some more meaningful things with my gifts and talents than work at Chartwells. He vowed that when I got back from Slovakia, we could continue to meet and that he would pay special attention to helping me find a way to use my gifts and to prepare myself more for my future calling, whatever that may be. He kept that vow in big ways this past year, which Id like to write more about later.
My SIP really sticks out to me too. I really liked writing my SIP. I really liked studying Thomas Reid and his way of thought and I liked thinking about the importance of testimony to our knowledge. So much of what we know comes from the word of others. We shouldnt treat the word of others too skeptically. We build our knowledge upon the foundation of testimony from the day we are born. And it is ultimately the testimony of Christ, presented to us through the testimony of His apostles and prophets, and confirmed to us by the testimony of the Holy Spirit, that we must trust to be saved.
"Sabrina Fair" sticks out to me. What a fun play to be a part of. You could write a book about it. Tyler Grisham, my partner in crime at Chartwells, played my brother in the play so we saw a lot of each other that semester. A girl named Laura Bannister was supposed to play Sabrina but she fell and broke her ankle after trying to jump down into a pit of mattressess that Catacombs had set up outside their hall window. So Catacombs almost singlehandedly destroyed the play that semester. But Emily Shaw, the director, stepped in at the last minute and learned all the lines, and thus starred in and directed her own play under some pretty excruciating pressure. But we pulled it off OK, and I got to become better friends with Courtney Withington, who played "Girl #2" in the play. Courtney has been one of my best friends in the past two years and she recently helped me drive out to Cono and helped me move into my apartment. She was the last Covenant friend I spent time with before starting my job here.
Courtney and I, along with Laura Kaufmann, Hope Davis, Jeff and Faith Orr, Brae and Lowen Howard, Phil Harvey, and Adam Belz, had a neat Fall Break that semester. We went to Nat Belz's house in North Carolina. I got to meet a good many Belz relations that week including Nat, Mindy, and Steve Lutz. I also got to see Gillian Welch live in Asheville. Good memories. Little did I know at the time that I would be surrounded by members of the Belz family for more years to come.
Next chapter: I'll talk about getting out to Slovakia and working at The Building. Those were some interesting days.
Posted by todd at August 12, 2005 06:19 PM