Of Things Gained

After being home from our monastic J-term and getting some time to relax and sleep in, I've also had time to reflect and converse with others about the things I gained from this experience. Many parts of the experience were pretty far outside my comfort zone, and they raised a lot of questions in me. Fortunately, I was always able to openly discuss my questions or skepticisms among the brothers or my friends, which sometimes helped and sometimes only raised more questions. Even with my questions, my main attitude during the whole two weeks was to be open to what God wanted to teach me, no matter how uncomfortable that may be. This was probably the best thing I could have done.

First off, I would say that as a result of this J-term class, my relationship with the Lord has grown A LOT! I feel so much closer to the Lord in a day-by-day and a moment-by-moment basis. I WANT to read the Scriptures, I WANT to pray, I WANT to worship. This has been great since being back and not having anything to do, which often results in boredom and slacking off for me.

I think one of the best things about the entire experience was just to be around these brothers who have committed their entire lives to the Lord. They have given up the possibility of wives and children, they have given up earning lots of money, they have given up personal freedom in order to devote themselves fully to the Lord. To know this and to see them live that out was an awesome example to me of what radical discipleship looks like. You could tell even just by the way they talked about the Lord that their commitment was full and absolute. It's an example that I want to strive to follow in my own life now.

Even though I struggled with the charismatic aspect of the worship in the Servants of the Word brotherhood, I learned a lot from it. Within the brotherhood and their communities, they sing a lot of their own songs--songs that have been written by people within them. It was interesting to observe that none of the songs that we sang were about us at all. Every single one was purely focused on the Lord, and really praising and worshiping Him. In our pop Christian culture, we call many songs "praise n' worship," but many of them are songs about us, or about how warm and fuzzy God makes us feel inside. Not these songs. They were really PRAISE--in the true and honest sense of the word. Praising God for who He is, for His character, His love, His might, His glory, etc. And singing like this really helped me to learn how to truly praise the Lord better, on a more real level. This is something that I'm definitely taking with me.

There were lots of other things I gained from this trip, but those are the main ones. Many others flow out from those. I still have lots of questions. I still don't know if the Lord is calling me to live single or not. I think rather through all of this He was trying to teach me to be content where I'm at and to trust His plan, which I think I've gained a lot of ground on.

Now we're back on the campus of HU, and I'm excited. I know that God has something planned for our campus this semester. Something BIG. I don't know what it is yet. But I think part of it may start with the morning prayers that we're starting up. 7am on MWF. It's going to suck getting up that early 3x a week. But it should be clear that this venture is a work of God, because those of us whom He chose to work it through are notoriously NOT morning people. So that is very exciting. I'm praying that the Lord takes this, and works many other great things in order to change the face of this campus, so that its Lord and King may be YHWH, the Great One, who wants to make radical disciples of the students on this campus. For the work and the change that is yet to be done, I praise Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in advance! Amen!

*SDG