Letting the Dust Settle

Recently, a sensitive, wonderful student sent an email to several folks in which he pondered the many questions that college often erupts into the life of a freshman.

When I read the email, I felt like I was in C-Dorm at Samford University trying to figure out if I mattered anymore. My mom and dad had just left me sitting on my mintish-green metal trunk and crying as they prepared to drive back to the life I had known--the life where I had been somebody--where I had been important.

These feelings invaded my thoughts as I read this student's letter. As I responded, I thought of how many of us struggle with the same issues of dark and light, the confusion about us. Sometimes we have to allow the dust to settle in order to be able to find our own way to believe.

I know when I entered college that I, too, stumbled across a doorway of light and dark, of answers of truth and answers that seemed evil, of what I thought was the right way and what everyone thought was the right way. I was amazed at what I was told in my classes, even at a Baptist school, about the flood being simply a folklore story found in various civilizations. Questions also arose about the truth of the Virgin Birth.

As a Southern Baptist preacher's kid, I struggled to mesh together the God of my First Baptist Church roots and the God conveyed in the college classroom. The hymns, prayer meetings, and scriptures which were the support beams of my upbringing began to crumble under this newfound knowledge. Religious dust scattered everywhere and with it my confusion.

Yet into that place of not knowing, God met me where I was--just as he is there to meet each of us. God doesn't change because people tell us different things. He is the same God, and will always be, and will always be there when we call.

I had to learn in my college days to let God be who he was for each person in the numerous ways he spoke to them. I had to realize I wasn't in charge of Religion of the World 101. It's a lesson that I'm still trying to learn at times.

During those days of questioning in college, a thought came to me: Why should we limit God to such small thinking? Are we the ones to say that God can only be God in a specific way? What I discovered then was that this God who knows our hearts and minds, our every need, the number of hairs on our head, can walk us through the confusion, and sometimes the confusion can make us stronger.

For me, once the dust had settled, I felt stronger about my belief in God. I felt if there was so much discussion and ongoing this and that about God, how more real could he be? If he wasn't real, then I didn't think people would care.

I was not in the manger with Mary and Joseph when Jesus was born. I was not with Noah during the flood. I cannot say first person what happened. But I trust by the grace of God that whatever happened and whatever way it happened and to however many cultures it happened and was told again and again, that it remains true in whatever sense I can hold it and grasp it. For what I'm holding is not a belief about a Virgin Birth or a flood story; I'm holding a belief in God's love, and that gift is universal and unending.

We are always on the journey God has set for us. Once we let the dust settle, he is still there.

ks