Five Things I Learned in College

Recently, I found an old journal from the summer before my freshman year of college. (And by “found,” I mean that I’ve been doing actual archeological digs to get rid of mounds of papers, ticket stubs, old folders, and other office supply debris that have accumulated on, in, and under my desk.)

As this journal was found in one of the lower strata, it’s pretty obvious that I hadn’t read it since the day I wrote it, August of 2009. Only a few pages are filled out, and one is a list of qualities that I wanted to develop during four years at college. It is, as I put it, “a reflection of all my weaknesses and failures,” the person I wanted to be as an eighteen-year-old but knew I wasn’t yet.

Guess what? I’m still not there yet. But it’s interesting, looking back at this list, that many of the ways that God specifically intervened in my life to change me were in these areas. Here are a few of them:

I want to be someone who…

Doesn’t need the approval of others.

            Okay, fine, this one is always going to be a struggle, because I love people and want people to love me. However, during these past four years I’ve learned how to distinguish between rejecting rejection and rejecting constructive criticism. The first one is good (not investing my identity in what people think of me and letting it control my actions). The second is terrible (ignoring ways I can improve pointed out by people I respect). What people think of me still matters…but the circle of whose opinions matter is getting smaller, and most of those people love me anyway.

Bacon in World Religions

So, fun fact: of the major world religions, Christianity is the only one that doesn’t officially prohibit bacon.

That’s right. If someone is a devout Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, or Jew, they’re not supposed to eat bacon. Pigs of the world, rejoice!

To me, this isn’t just a bit of trivia, or a suggestion for a new kind of evangelism. I wrote my final research paper of my college career on bacon in different world religions. (Always an excellent way to end an academic career—ten pages of research wrapped in greasy pigskin.)

"For where your bacon is, there will your heart be also." (Really New Living Translation)

Anyway, here’s a quick summary of the reasons other religions don’t allow bacon. (I am not even doing justice to this here, but I figured you didn’t want to read a ten-page paper about it.)

Bacon in Judaism

• The Mosaic Law includes pork as an unclean food

• Important for being set apart

• Emphasizes the fact that having specific rules even around food makes them aware of God’s lordship in everyday life

• Only Orthodox, not Reformed

Bacon in Islam

• Pork is forbidden in the Qur’an (unless you’re starving)

• Pigs are seen as dirty and brazen

• General obedience to a command of Allah

Bacon in Hinduism and Buddhism

• Vegetarianism preached (eating animals leads to bad karma), but not practiced by all devotees

• Ethics of harming animals—belief that god is in/through everything

• Could lead to violence in other areas

The Five Best Ways to Say Goodbye to Me

Understatement of the year: I strongly dislike saying goodbyes. But, since I'm graduating, I’ve been doing a lot of that recently, with more to go. I’ve noticed that, for some people, it’s hard to know what to do or say when saying goodbye to a college graduate. In the name of helping people out of unnecessarily awkward situations, I have compiled a list of five ways to say goodbye to me.

A hundred million bonus points to you if you somehow manage to do all five at once.

One: Give me a hug.

I like hugs. And this week, I might need them.

Two: Find a “See you in heaven if not sooner” card instead of a graduation card.

I’m really just kidding. Graduation cards are great (although whoever invented those dumb hats probably thinks it’s hilarious that their practical joke has stuck for this long).

Seriously, though, the prospect of an infinite amount of time with these great people who I might not see again around here is very encouraging. Especially because in heaven, we won’t have stupid misunderstandings or bad tempers or frustratingly vague relationships or any of that nonsense. It’s going to be a party.

Three: Tell me you’re praying for me.

Graduation is scary, and I’m not entirely sure what I’m doing yet. I appreciate people saying they’ll miss me and they’ll pray for me.

Four: Vandalize something I own.

This may seem counter-intuitive, but throwing a rock through my window, slashing my tires, or painting a frowny-face on my laptop screen allows me to be angry at you instead of sad that you’re leaving. I can channel all of my negative emotions into yelling at/suing you instead of just being miserable that you’re cool and I’m going away.

(I’m totally kidding, by the way. Put that can of spraypaint down, sir.)

Five: Fill out an application to be my pen pal.

I am not actually kidding about this one. I love writing letters. I’m also really bad at keeping track of addresses. So this was my solution. Also, the questions were just really fun to write.

Here’s the application. Copy it, fill it out and either print it and give it to me, or send it to me via email. I can’t promise more than a letter or two a year, depending on how many people do this, but I would love to stay in touch with you the snail mail way.

So, thanks to everyone reading this blog who’s been a part of my four years of college. I love you, I’ll miss you, I’m looking forward to seeing you and hearing from you again in whatever form that takes.

Three Brave Prayers

Sometimes, I don’t know what to pray for. James 1:5 tells us wisdom is always a good idea. But what does that mean, exactly, in practical, everyday life?

Probably a lot of things, but here are three prayers I prayed during college and what happened because of them. They’re kind of terrifying, but I highly recommend them.

1. Pray that God will reveal your sin to you.

This took me until sophomore year to get up the courage to try. Because, you see, I like to think I’m perfect sometimes. So really, there’s nothing in my life I need to work on, right?

Wrong. So wrong. Once I prayed this prayer, I started noticing my hidden attitude problems, from my desire to always be right to the fact that I didn’t really listen to others—I just waited to talk. Suddenly, I had a very long list of things to work on.

But I also have a God who specializes in helping out with those long lists, and shows grace when I mess up. That’s a pretty important thing to note when praying this particular prayer to avoid either despairing because of your pathetic, miserable status, or of shifting into legalism overdrive to fix all the problems yourself.

It’s not fun to realize there are parts of you that are disgusting and terrible, kind of like cleaning out the back corners of the fridge and discovering a year’s worth of mold growing in a cottage cheese container. But to get rid of the messes, you have to be aware of them first.

The Challenge of Ethos

Of the three points of Aristotle's triangle of rhetoric, I tend to be an ethos-heavy writer. That doesn’t mean that I don’t make logical sense or never appeal to emotion, just that my subject matter and “punchlines” (the sentences in a blog post, essay, or story that I spend extra time crafting and drive a point home) are often character/ethics centered.

When I learned about Aristotle’s triangle of rhetoric in high school, my teacher had us write a personal essay that emphasized one of the three points. He ended with a brief warning: “Most students stay away from ethos. That one’s really hard to do gracefully.”

You are seventeen-year-old Amy. What do you do?

Yep. Take that as a challenge and focus on ethos. I had no idea how to do that, really, but I thought I'd give it a try. My essay was about how I thought the select choir group at our school was made up of arrogant divas…until I became a part of it and experienced what it was like to be treated like an arrogant diva.

When my teacher graded it, this is what he said at the end. “At first, I was skeptical and felt like you were being a bit judgmental…and then you turned it around on yourself. And suddenly, everything worked.”

I had unknowingly stumbled onto one of the keys to using ethos gracefully: be a relatable character.

When It Is Not Well With Your Soul

Sometimes, when I sing songs in church and chapel about God remaining faithful in hard times, I can't really relate at the moment. My life is good, and it feels almost dishonest to sing about how I can still love God in spite of suffering. Does “It Is Well With My Soul” mean anything on sunny, happy days? Probably not, or at least not as much. 

So you know what I do?

I sing those songs to the future. I say the words with everything in me, almost like I’m pouring them into a bottle and wedging in a cork. Saving them. Waiting.

Then, when the hard days come and I’m struggling to believe that God loves me and acts justly in a world that is very, very broken, I take them out again. Because on those days, I cannot sing those words and mean them. It is not well with my soul, the name of the Lord is not blessed, and while he may give and take away, I cannot praise him for it. I’m not strong enough, not brave enough.

Which leads me to think that faith is not always what we think it is.

It is not dispensing pithy Christian sayings or inspirational Bible verses to someone who is grieving. (Not that those things are inherently bad, but that would be like taking your sick child to the doctor and having the doctor give him a toy from the treasure chest and a Batman Band-Aid instead of acknowledging and dealing with the real problem.)

Faith is not easy answers and gritted-teeth determination to be happy despite pain. I don’t even think it’s always being serenely at peace with everything that happens, although that peace may eventually come.

Real faith sometimes has to use the bottled praise. It clings to the memories of a distant promise, even when nothing around it seems to fit with that promise. It tries to sing, but when only laments come, those laments are still worship, because they contain a courageous defiance that says, like the psalmist, “I will yet praise him.”

Questions and Answers

Sometimes, when we want easy answers, we get hard answers.

Probably the best Biblical example of this is Job. If you slog through his monologues, he basically thinks he can call God into a courtroom and get everything straightened out. With a little cross-examination of the distant deity, his friends will suddenly understand exactly what was going on.

When God shows up, the reader expects him to talk about the bet with Satan, the drama that went on up in the courts of heaven. That would still vindicate Job, although in a different way than Job himself was looking for. It would still be an easy answer.

Instead, God launches into a speech about his own power, and his relationship to creation. It’s about what he values and what he can do and what would happen if he wasn’t constantly sustaining it all. Which is interesting and all, but makes you wonder things like, “What does this have to do with anything?” “If God is totally in control of nature, does that mean he is responsible for the deaths in natural disasters?” and “How is this just?” God’s speech to Job seems to raise more questions than it answers.

That’s fine with me, most days. I love hard answers. There is a kind of beauty in the gray areas of paradox, and a certain smugness that goes along with believing two seemingly opposing things. It’s the same kind of smug feeling I get when I tell people that I love the windy, rainy weather. You are just too unsophisticated to understand the true beauty of storms, I think to myself. Oh, sure, sunny cloudless days are nice. But there’s a power in difficult weather that you have to be really deep to appreciate.

But guess what? Sometimes, when we want hard answers, we get easy answers. And that teaches us humility too.