Devotion Archives
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Learning for Life: Cultivating a Student Spirituality
Week 1
Virginia Lettinga,
co-chaplain at UNBC, Prince George, British Columbia
1.1 You don’t know where you’re going
“It was by faith that Abraham obeyed when God called him to leave home and go to another land…. He went without knowing where he was going.”
Hebrews 11:8 NLT
You don’t know where you’re going. This not a reassuring thought at the beginning of a new semester, but it’s true. In spite of the new student orientation sessions; in spite of a well-organized planner; in spite of a course schedule that promises you discussions about the ancient Greeks in week two, a test in week six, and a lecture about the Reformation in week ten; in spite of your finding the short cut to the dining hall. You don’t know where you are going.
Sit in your first class and look around you. Some of these people may become lifelong friends. Others may be the burrs in your college career – classmates whose humor and habits strain your nerves. That dry and fidgety lecturer may befriend you during a mid-semester crisis and completely change the way you think. The paper topic you pick because it looks easy may somehow grip your imagination and lead you to a new major and an undreamed of career. You don’t know where you’re going to be at the end of the semester.
Most of us hate this insecure, unsure feeling. We feel we ought to know what our major is, what our career will be, and whom we will marry.
But there is Abraham, the great father of the faithful – and our model. A man who “went without knowing where he was going.” Of course, there were some things Abraham did know. He knew the land he was headed for was going to be his inheritance. He knew he was called to leave his old, familiar territory. And He knew who had called him: God. And these are the things we, too, know at the start of a new school year. Like Abraham, we go obediently without knowing exactly where we are going.
Prayer: Dear God-who-knows-the-end-of-things,
Give me wisdom for the choices I make today.
Give me sight for the steps I take.
Grant me courage for all that remains unknown and unsure;
help me to follow in the path of Abraham. Amen
1.2 Living in a foreign place
“And even when he [Abraham] reached the land God promised him, he lived there by faith--for he was like a foreigner, living in a tent. And so did Isaac and Jacob…” Hebrews 11:9 NLT
Have you arrived on campus feeling like Abraham – feeling that your housing arrangements are nothing but a “tent,” a temporary arrangement for this semester or this year? Feeling that your real home – with familiar stuff and friends – is somewhere else? Feeling like this will do, but wondering where your bookcase or favorite chair will fit in your next room or rez hall?
New students often experience this “foreign feeling” sharply as they meet the craziness of moving in and the new and uncertain personalities up and down the hall. But even returning students usually find a moment in early September when they feel like foreigners. A moment before they’ve settled into a groove, but after they’ve discovered some things that were changed on them during the summer. A moment when it suddenly seems crazy to call this campus with unexplored buildings and unknown classmates: “yours.” You are a foreigner, and your dorm room is merely a “tent.”
Many students fight this identification, but in spite of distinctive posters and personal touches, your dorm sheets, mini-fridge, desk lamp and video games are no more permanent than the stuff inside the tents in which Abraham, Isaac and Jacob lived. And in a culture that urges us to claim space as our own and to pile possessions upon it, it’s healthy to have moments when we clearly see how temporary this is.
Abraham offers us a model that cuts across our culture’s drive to claim turf and mark it as “ours.” He lived like a foreigner. And as a model of how to live by faith. How could claiming the identity of “foreigner”– instead of fighting it – shape your life on campus? What limitations would such an identity give you? How might such limitations shape you?
Prayer: Dear God,
Help me to look forward instead of backward with my longings. Help me look forward to my final and real home. And give me grace to be gentle and to welcome others who feel lost or foreign in the next weeks. Amen
1.3 Living with Others
And even when [Abraham] reached the land God promised him, he lived there by faith—for he was like a foreigner, living in tents. Hebrews 11:9
It was an awful shock when the dorm RA flung open my new dorm room door and I saw that my roommate had arrived before me – and had defined our room in pink checks and lace flounces. The window wore a pink gingham half curtain and valance. There were pink gingham bedspreads on both our beds, and beribboned pink gingham bolters behind our pillows. The RA set down one of my two cardboard boxes and said feebly, “it’s kinda cute if you like this sort of thing.”
Then my roommate waltzed in, introduced herself, and joyfully produced a pink teddy-bear carpet she had just purchase for our floor.
I left all my stuff in the cardboard boxes, which bugged my roommate. I wouldn’t make up my bed, which bugged her more; and within a couple of weeks I found someone with whom to trade roommates, and we were heartily relieved to no longer be living together.
You could probably draw multiple lessons from my experience: don’t trust college compatibility surveys (if you think my roommate’s pink gingham penchant irritated me, let me tell you about her music!), and come prepared to negotiate with your roommate about decoration styles are two. But at the time what it really convinced me of was that college was full of people who were entirely unlike me. I knew I was a foreigner. But I hung on; I lived by faith.
To say that Abraham “lived by faith” is a way of saying that he lived with uncertainty, that he lived waiting to see what God would do next. We, too, need to live like this – whether we are sleeping in dorm rooms, in a student house, or in the bed of our youth in our parents’ home. Roommates and new space offer challenges, however, that may more easily prod us to live like Abraham on multiple levels.
Prayer: Dear Father,
help me to listen to those with whom I live.
Help me to look around me and see things through their eyes.
And help me to live by faith.
In Jesus’ name. Amen.
1.4 Looking to the Future
And even when he reached the land God promised him…Abraham was confidently looking forward to a city with eternal foundations, a city designed and built by God. Hebrews 9 & 10
Was there a moment when you spread all the catalogues and promotions across your kitchen table and gloated that so many prestigious-sounding colleges and universities wanted you to make their campus your home? And then you threw out the ones that seemed ridiculous, weighed and wondered about the others, applied to a handful, and finally were accepted into your current school. It was a complicated process of forms and essays.
But you’re there now. You moved there this fall. You’re in. You are living in the land that the catalogue promised – perhaps even living in the perfect September weather that so often graces its photos. But even though you have reached this promised land, you know that your journey is beginning, not ending. It is easy to identify with Abraham who reached the land God promised him, but was “confidently looking forward.”
How far ahead are you looking? What are you looking forward to? Identifying a major? Graduating? Finding a career? Finding a loving life partner? Each of those stages will also invite you to stop and consider them a “promised land.” But always there is the model of Abraham, who arrived on the soil of God’s promised land – and yet looked farther ahead.
According to the author to the Hebrews, Abraham looked forward to a world that was radically reshaped by God, to a world that was nothing like his current nomadic world of Bedouin tents. Abraham looked forward to a “city with eternal foundations, designed and built by God.”
How far ahead are you looking? How far out do your confident hopes carry you?
Prayer: Father, Saviour & Spirit,
Help me to look forward – and into the distance.
Give me courage past this day, this week, this semester.
Amen.
1.5 Longing to be Somewhere Else
[Abraham and his family] agreed that they were foreigners and nomads here on earth. Obviously people who say such things are looking forward to a country they can call their own. If they had longed for the country they came from, they could have gone back. Hebrews 11:13-15
Do you wish you were somewhere else?
I was recently in a student room in which the desk space was a three-walled cubical completely covered with pictures of where she would rather be. The wall to the right of the desk was full of her favorite places: striking posters of the Canadian Rockies lit up with jewel-like flowers and photos of hikes and mountain biking and whitewater rafting. The wall to the left was full of friends and things she’d done with them: the high school jazz band, her friends acting crazy in the pool, camping with the youth group, a crowd dressed up to look like they’d come out with the gold rush. The wall directly in front of the desk was full of family photos: two sets of grand parents, her younger siblings and the artwork they’d sent, her parents, and the dogs.
When the student later mentioned that she was finding it hard to study, I admitted that I would have had an awful time studying at a desk like hers. “Why?” she asked in surprise. “I always keep it neat and organized.”
“But every time you look up, something you see is guaranteed to make you long to be somewhere else.”
I visited her room about a month later and was surprised to find that she’d moved the photos to the outside of the desk cubical, and the inside walls were dominated by a calendar, a list of assignments she needed to complete, and a photo of the women on her dorm floor.
“I still love all my old photos,” she explained, “but I know that this is where I’m supposed to be now. I can’t go back. I have to look forward. And it’s easier to study this way.”
Prayer: Dear God,
There are moments when I long to be somewhere and somewhen else:
with old friends or with my family, in a more familiar space and time.
Help me to look forward instead of backward with my longings. Help me to live cheerfully in the moment I have now – in this space with these friends and with the demands of my current classes. In Jesus’ name. Amen
1.6 Following a call – against the odds
“It was by faith the even Sarah was able to have a child, though she was barren and was too old. She believed that God would keep his promise.” Hebrews 11:11 NLT
Each fall a fresh set of first year students cheerily tell me that they are premed and are going to become doctors. They know it will take hard work, but they know they are bright and capable and this is their dream! But then they struggle with the first week’s calculus assignment. Or they cannot stand to skip the Saturday night parties. Or they are reluctant to sit for hours and hours pouring over an organic chemistry textbook when their roommate’s philosophy class sounds so interesting. By the second semester many of these students are considering majors that fit more comfortably with their personalities and gifts: social work or education, history or English.
But each year I also meet students who are true sons and daughters of Sarah – students who have set their eyes on a goal and hang on to it despite the contrary indications. I know a wonderful nurse who slowly completed most of her program at half the normal speed; though she was never able to carry a full course load and earn good grades, she plugged along with two courses a semester for nine years… and finally graduated. I know a fantastic fourth grade teacher who patiently retook a quarter of her courses in order to earn high enough scores.
How can you tell if your dream is one you should hang on to against the odds? How can you know that it is a real “calling” from God that you should pursue even when the going is rough? I don’t have a simple answer. But it is worth noticing Sarah, tucked in beside Abraham among the names listed in Hebrews 11. And I’m encouraged to see that “She believed that God would keep his promise.” Because I know that she did not always believe that. We know that she laughed behind the tent door. We all suffer from moments of self-doubt. But clearly Sarah believed enough to be accounted among the great heroes of faith
Prayer: Dear Father,
By your mercy, please give me enough of a sense of call and direction to know what to choose today and to do tomorrow. Help me trust in you and look for where you are leading. In Jesus’s name, Amen
1.7 Belonging as a Nomad
All these people…. agreed that they were foreigners and nomads here on earth. Obviously people who say such things are looking forward to a country they can call their own. Hebrews 11:13, 14
Belonging matters. Colleges and universities know it and worry about it. Research shows that students who don’t put down roots and come to feel like they “belong” tend to transfer or drop out. So it’s good advice to make it a priority to find friends and to be a friend in the early weeks. For the good of the students and for the good of their own institutions, colleges and universities try to help students quickly lose the foreign feeling. They encourage students to participate in campus orientation, to join student clubs, and to socialize in ways that will help them make friends and become familiar with the hallways and facilities. They would like to you quickly fit in and belong.
But there are limits to the kind of “belonging” that happens on campus. Successful students find friends with whom to socialize and communities in which to serve, but no one hopes that you will make your college or university your permanent home. Students who stick around past the time when they should graduate are considered unhealthy. The academic halls are supposed to be the territory of foreigners and nomads – a place to enter and explore, but also a place to move through and move on from.
Abraham’s family “agreed they were foreigners and nomads. To the author of the letter to the Hebrews, this is an odd and profound choice. They didn’t put down roots, although they had arrived in their homeland. Abraham’s family negotiated an odd space in which, while on earth, they both belong and are foreigners. The university years force you into something of a similar situation. Such a situation may keep you vulnerable. And flexible. And encourage you to live by faith.
Prayer: Dear God-of-Abraham,
Help me to find friends -- and to be a friend -- at this school.
Help me find a way to live contentedly without being secure;
stretch me and shape me as a foreigner and nomad.
In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Copyright © CRCMA 2008
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