A letter from Apr 29th, 2021

Hey, This is the final day of your freshman year of college, woohoo! I don’t know where you’re at in presently, but right now I am exhausted. I hope by five years from now you have figured out how to handle your unhealthy coping mechanisms a bit better. I hope you have come to find the beauty in subtlety, because life’s greatest gifts can often get lost in the shuffle. But remember, you’re not the one who shuffles the deck that this life is comprised of, you simply have a hand of cards with which the Spirit empowers you to discern how to play the game of life most effectively. Five years from now I have full confidence that you have been able to come up with better metaphors that that… Hopefully, five years in the future you have learned how to be relatively better discipled in the rhythms of spiritual life than you now are—maybe you’re in a residency that affords you an abundance of time for study and sabbath… who knows. If not, I hope you at least graduated with your B.A., but if you didn’t do that either, may you carry the Spirit into any place where you find yourself. Please continue to learn what it means to come into sync with what Eugene Peterson calls “the unforced rhythms of grace”. Matter of fact, go back and read the MSG translation of Matthew’s passage on Christ’s easy yolk right now. If I know you at all, I know with assurance that as long as you’re here that passage will be timelessly relevant. And as far as evangelism and discipleship, I hope you remember that in whatever ministry capacity you may find yourself in years down the road, you remember that belonging comes before believing and believing comes before behavior. For now, all I have left to say is that the mere fact that you’re reading this letter is something to feel a certain level of pride in, because freshman of college and the first eighteen years of this life have been a tidal wave that never seems to stop crashing in. Stop attributing your unmet expectations onto yourself, convincing yourself that you’re worthless. There is a profound realization that you arrived at earlier this semester while eating lunch with Jackie Baker, “God loves you, but what does it mean that He does? It means that you are worthy of being loved. Of course, this has nothing to do with anything you could ever do, but it is simply because you are called ‘beloved’ by the One who is love.” That said, holdfast to the truth of who you are and the worth you have. You are not the sum of your mistakes, you are not the sum of the hand of cards that you have been dealt in this life, the suffering you encounter and endure is an opportunity for God to draw you closer to Him. Don’t forget to listen. Truly, some of he loudest sounds, and moments of intense urgency occur when we allow ourselves to listen in the midst of deafening silence. The God you believe in is not confined to the difficult experiences you have faced; He calls you to greater things. So, as you take this pause out of your twenty-three year old self’s day, don’t forget that you are called to and destined for great things—great things for and within the Kingdom that you have been eternally adopted into. Learn to love yourself in the process of understanding what this purpose means.