Today has been a good day because of four situations--the Cornerstone lecture, seeing Mary DeLaughter, seeing Jonathan Storment, and my 9:30 class tomorrow got canceled.
First off, the Cornerstone class. Dr. Jeanene Reese was the speaker this week, and her title was "Decisions, Decisions, Decisions." And as she spoke, I noticed that she is a very good orator. She tells a story with skill I haven't seen paralleled in a while. She doesn't lean on charisma; she believes in the power of what she is speaking, and that's rare. She told the story of how her husband died in a freak accident, and how she dealt with it. I was riveted. On the screen behind her, she showed pictures of herself and her husband before he died, and as I looked at her face, I felt like I was looking at someone who was completely happy. Maybe she was photogenic, but I got the impression from her speech that she loved this man deeply. She loved their lives together, the things they did, the people they associated with. They were going to be missionaries. They were going to start a family. Their whole life was ready to begin.
And then it happened. She woke one morning to the sound of friends frantically calling for her, and she drove to the site where her husband had died and cried in the arms of two men who smelled of the smoke that had enveloped the life of her spouse. She told us this story with such confidence that she wasn't afraid to let us see her vulnerability. She lost her love. And her planned life was gone.
She told us, then, that she had a choice to make. She had to choose how she was going to make choices. Sounds repetitive, I know, but she made sense of it. She said that she could either succumb to doing what she wanted (which she didn't tell us what that was), or she could give glory to God, even in these dire circumstances. She chose the latter. Then, Reese listed four ways that she was going to change her thinking, but they were so Christian-cliched that I can't remember them. What I remember is an interesting phrase that she repeated several times. She said that we need to be "students of our own minds."
What does that mean, to be students of our own minds? Reese said it means to consider why we do things, what causes us to do them. She then told us a story of a time when she protected a younger woman from a troupe of baboons, using spiritual, motherly, and educational learning. These different types of learning caused her to act a certain way, in this case the right way.
What I want to consider is the act of separating one from oneself. If we are to be students of our own minds, we have to think of our minds as an independent object and evaluate it in that way. For example, I often take a book to the Bean when I know I'm going to sit alone. Why is that? Well, one reason is because I like reading that book. Another and more important reason is that if I sit by myself with nothing physically occupying my attention, I will be looked on by others as "lonely" or "without friends," so people will come and sit with me. They are acting out of kindness, yes, but it makes the whole situation awkward. So, I bring a book with me.
What I just did was take a situation and dissected it to see its mental stimuli. We do according to what we think. And Dr. Reese wants us to consider the thoughts behind the actions, the ideas that tend to go unexamined. Because if we don't, we will end up as adults who have no idea why they work at their job, why they have a family, why they go to church; and the results will never be positive.
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The next good thing that happened was that I saw Mary. I met Mary at Lit Meet my junior year through Amanda. She and I sat in the foyer of the Bible building and discussed our lives for a good chunk of time--she told me how she had almost put school off for a year in order to be a part of The Simple Way, the community in Philadelphia of which Shane Claiborne is a part. From that, we became friends. I would see her whenever I was at ACU or she visited Ft. Worth with Amanda.
I got a phone call from a number I didn't recognize, so I called it back, and when the person on the other end picked up, I immediately knew who it was. I hope Mary was surprised that I knew her by her voice. She told me that we had almost been in school a whole month and we hadn't seen each other, and that needed to change. So we met outside the library, where she didn't recognize me at first because of my long hair and glasses. I have a feeling that is going to happen a lot when I go home, which I don't want, but I'll have to deal with because I like my look. Anyway, we stood outside the library for a solid half-hour and talked. We caught up on our lives, talked about scraping ashes, water, and cow poop on the floor of a mud hut to keep it clean (Mary studied in Africa last semester), and enjoyed knowing that we were friends. Mary commented that before, we had only been friends through Amanda, which was fine. But now we have the chance to be friends on our own. That seems like a truer friendship. I felt completely comfortable around her, which is a good thing. I think that is the identifier of a good friend. She's so cool.
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After that, I ran into J-Storm (a nickname that, I learned, Rick calls him. Who knew?) in the foyer of the campus center. We went several places, the campus store, the library, the walkway in front of the Bible building, and we talked as we went. I learned that Jonathan has a tentative lesson plan all the way until December. I want to know how he comes up with an individual lesson, whether he randomly studies a passage from the section he has planned and constructs something from that, or if he has a schedule of every verse and every Sunday.
But as we walked, we talked about normal things, we had a normal conversation. It was as if I was talking to Aaron, and it was surreal when I stepped back and considered that I was hanging out with my preacher. I wonder what Jonathan must be going through, being young and heading a church. I wonder how it is to speak to people much older than he, who have had more life experiences than he has. He must pray often, because if he is just going off his knowledge he won't last very long. I assume he works very hard and prays frequently.
I found out that he loves "Community," so we might watch an episode together or something and hang out. Again, I feel like I'm in a unique situation to have a minister so close to my age. I wonder what will become of this.
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And my Psych class got canceled, which sucks, but it also means that I can sleep in. Oh, but wait, I have to get B-Roll of kids walking to school. Shoot me.
Overall, good day.
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