Yesterday evening, as I was flitting down to the second floor of one of the main campus buildings in search of coffee creamer, I came across a cozy little corner filled with mischievously-grinning college students. Two of them were personal friends, and so I felt license to ask them why precisely they were all wearing the I've-got-an-inside-joke grin as they sat around laughing knowingly.

"Well, we were just wondering if you were homeschooled...or if you're a homeschooler," piped up one bright-eyed little sophomore named Ian.

"Um, what?"

"Yeah. There's a difference. Here. You need to see this."

At which point, all of us (because apparently everyone in this little group had been homeschooled), crowded around somebody's laptop to watch this video...which I found amusing enough to share.

It is perhaps one of the singular peculiarities of Christianity that often times when we are most struggling with something, God sends to us another person struggling with the same issue on a deeper level, and through the process of helping and counseling the struggling friend, we ourselves are most deeply reminded of all the answers and truths we already knew.

Two weeks ago, I was home alone one evening, and perhaps my mind had begun to play tricks on me, as it is wont to do when it hasn’t been properly tasked in the first place. I was thinking back over the past several months, and feeling more than a little discouraged over the apparent futility of much of what had taken place. When we’re little children, it’s so easy to have exalted dreams—it’s the living out of those exalted dreams in later years that sometimes leaves you feeling a wee bit brutalized, because you realize that big dreams require big sacrifice.

I was vainly attempting to put together a jigsaw puzzle that night, but my mind was in overdrive and making it rather difficult to concentrate: Why are you really here, Thea? What was the purpose, exactly, of the last 23 years? What are you trying to accomplish, and why is there so little visible progress towards that goal? You’re home on break now—and doing what exactly? Let’s be real—would the world really be any different if you had never lived? You can’t even fix the problems within your own family.

The voice inside was rather ruthless that night, and I was in a poor position to defend myself from the onslaught, having once allowed the questions to begin. Sometimes the overwhelming feeling of the insignificance of everything good we’ve ever said or done really, really gets to me, and in the darkness and the silence, I dropped my head and let the tears fall, feeling suddenly keenly inadequate to answer the charges rising against me in my own mind. Why exactly AM I here? I wondered.

My phone buzzed just then—a text message from a friend several states away. He was feeling discouraged, wondering why God had him where he was, what purpose he was supposed to be fulfilling, and why it seemed that everything he’d ever said or done didn’t matter anyway. Life was kicking him in the teeth, so what was the point of continuing to try? No one was listening to what he had to say, even when he was right—what was the point of this uselessness?

Wow. Ok. So maybe the devil works through isolation, and robs us of our joy and our sense of purpose by catching us alone, when we’re most vulnerable, and beating us over the head with our failures.

As I pointed out to my friend that often times, the ministry we think God has given us to one person may actually be God’s way of helping us to minister to another person entirely, I was pondering the irony of it all—strange that he should be struggling with the same thing, tonight of all nights.

Messages flew back and forth for maybe an hour. I pointed out that wisdom is not made less wise because it is ignored, and that our value as the counselor isn’t determined by the response of the one counseled—that sometimes, God allows us to be ignored, to feel impotent…in order to increase our capacity to trust that His timing is perfect, and force us to realize that we were never in control of the situation in the first place. I reminded him of Jeremiah—that many of the prophets were called to speak to people who not only refused to listen, but also hated the prophet himself and tried to kill him on multiple occasions. Talk about a nasty job with no visible results! And yet the far-reaching impact of Jeremiah’s obedience to God’s command to testify is still impacting the Christians of 21^st century America. Our faithfulness in the little things, like our sin, has the potential to impact untold thousands of men, women, and children in some respect or another.

And as I wrote these things, I realized that God had sent this friend to me tonight because I needed to hear all of the things that I was telling him—I needed to be reminded, and I needed to believe that they were true in my own life. Sometimes God speaks to our hearts through the questions that we ask others: Are you willing to be a Jeremiah of the 21^st century? Are you willing to be faithful even when it’s thankless, and you can’t see the results? Are you willing to believe that the God-honoring decisions that you make on a daily basis may be done on behalf of someone who will read about you in 350 years?

A week later, I was spending a few days with my sister and her husband in the Twin Cities. Somehow, when I spend a lot of time around couples, I become more keenly aware of the fact that I’m very much not a couple—and for me, there’s a natural tendency to begin to wonder why not, and what exactly is God’s timeline, and why isn’t it a little faster?

So all of these vague feelings of discontentment were rankling in the back of my mind, making ugly noises (and uglier attitudes!) when I got a phone call from a friend. She was struggling to believe that God actually had her best in mind—that He could and would make something beautiful out of her broken story, that He could or would prepare her for and give her a God-fearing husband and allow her the privilege of helping that man to raise godly children.

“How do I know, Thea?” she asked, the desperation undisguised in her voice, “and what if He doesn’t? What if I wait, and I do everything right that I know to do, and nothing ever changes? What if the waiting and the being frustrated just goes on forever? It’s not worth it—why not just have kids out of wedlock, because what if the real thing never happens?”

I appreciated her honesty. I think we all wonder those things at one point or another—maybe often, or nearly all the time.

But I asked her if she believed that God actually loves her. There was a pause, and then quietly, she admitted that she believes He does—100% of the time, 100% of His ability, which is infinitely greater than our finite capacity to even comprehend. Sometimes the best way to get through to somebody is just to keep asking questions.

“Do you believe that He controlled your past? That He knows your future? That He holds you right now in the palm of His hand? That He would ever plan something for you that was not ultimately in your best interest? Can you trust Him? Really? How much can you trust Him? Is He a God that’s worthy of our trust? Our love? Are you sure? Why are you sure? Historically, when we look at Scripture, how many times has He let down the human race? Oh really—none?! So what are the odds that His character has drastically changed in the last ten minutes? Look at Abraham—God promises him a son. And then he waits and he waits, and he waits some more—there are 25 long years between the time when God gives that promise and the day when Isaac is born. Were there times when Abraham questioned whether or not God really meant it? Whether or not he could trust God’s word? Whether or not he could trust God’s heart for him? How could there NOT have been times when he questioned all of the above? Where do we think Ishmael came from if there were no times when Abraham questioned? But did God come thru? And was His plan ultimately best the whole time? Is He the same God today as He was then? Can we believe Him when He tells us that He’s an unchanging God? Are you sure? How sure are you? Why do you think that God ordained the institution of marriage? What’s the purpose of marriage, when obviously people can have sex without being married? What if it’s protective—and what if He meant it to protect YOU, to help you grow, to provide an atmosphere in which you can be nurtured and loved, in which your husband can grow, and your children can thrive? What if marriage is God’s way of bringing glory to Himself? Is it worth it to wait, if you know beyond any shadow of a doubt that what God has for you is better than anything that you could ever get for yourself by refusing to wait?...”

By the end of an hour and a half, I wasn’t sure how much I’d gotten thru to her, but I knew that I was now convinced (and I also knew that I was running out of questions)—and again, I marveled at the wisdom of a God who sends someone to us for counsel in the area in which we ourselves are struggling. Crazy. In a genius sort of way.

And suddenly, I was really, really thankful for the fact that God didn’t give me a group of perfect friends, as I’d sometimes jokingly thought would be nice. He gave me a circle of people who are as broken as myself—because He understood from time immemorial that it’s in attempting to apply truth to the cancer of lies in the life of another that the lies in our own lives are most effectively exposed and confronted.

I suppose that when we begin to pray for God to make us mindful of humanity’s woundedness, to increase the tenderness of our hearts towards the pain of others, and to give us opportunities to comfort others with the comfort with which He has comforted us…we should expect an answer. But I confess, sometimes? His answers—and the ways in which they come—are rather shocking to me.

Last night was one of those nights that I found the divine tweaking of my life plans to be rather…shocking.

It’s finals week here at Liberty…and as a result, I’ve been spending more than the usual amount of time in hibernation with my textbooks and my own befuzzled thought processes (the latter is possibly not a good thing).

However, each year, Liberty does a sort of campus-wide talent show—and you have to be rather talented to get in as a performer, so it actually is rather impressive to watch—on the Friday night of the first official day of finals. A kind friend had purchased a ticket for me to attend, but I guess yesterday, I just wasn’t feeling it—sometimes there is something inside of me that rebels at the thought of being surrounded by crowds of people when my heart and mind are desperately longing for time alone under a starlit sky—I call them wilderness moments…because sometimes, we just need to withdraw from the rest of the human race and spend some time listening for what God is really trying to say to us (it’s a pattern first modeled by Christ, and you know, He was a pretty cool guy, so...just saying).

Thus, at around eleven o’clock, when everyone else was just settling down to watch the wonders of Christmas Coffeehouse on Liberty’s campus, I was driving up the side of a mountain in the dark, humming under my breath, and only half aware of the millions of different thoughts churning around inside my brain.

As I turned onto my street, I noticed out of the corner of my eye that there was a young man walking alongside the road. He was dressed all in black—black t-shirt, black shorts—and no reflective anything on him anywhere.

That’s weird, I thought to myself, and kinda dangerous. If you’re gonna be out at night to exercise, at least wear something besides black so people can see you.

I kept driving, but somehow, something about the situation wasn’t sitting right with me.

Thea, a little voice nagged, you’ve gotta go back. If he was just out here to exercise this late at night, then why wasn’t he running? He had a backpack on.

So I turned the car around, and went back to check on him. As I pulled up alongside him, I rolled down my window and asked him if he was ok.

He looked a little dazed, and I wasn’t sure at first whether or not he was drunk. I was surprised by how young he was—he was just a highschool kid, at the most.

“Um, I’m…really not ok,” he mumbled, tottering a little bit as he headed towards my car.

As he got closer, I could see that he was telling the truth.

“What on earth happened to your face, man?!” I blurted. There was blood oozing from a number of abrasions on his head, and dried blood all around his mouth—somebody had obviously roughed him up a bit.

“Uh, a guy beat me up,” he said dazedly, staring into my face vacantly. “Can you help me?”

“Well, I can’t exactly leave you out here to freeze to death,” I retorted. “Get in the car.”

He’d been out in the cold for three hours without a coat, in his shirtsleeves and shorts, and it took him an hour just to stop shivering. Gradually, as I peppered him with questions and tried to calm him down, his story began to come out in bits and pieces between sobs and long pauses.

I have rarely seen desperation manifested quite as obviously as it was in this child. He literally leaned over and latched onto my arm like a frightened kitten, clinging to me and weeping for two hours as I cradled his head in the crook of my arm and stroked his hair and just asked questions, and listened, and prayed silently for wisdom to know what to say next.

Sometimes the depth of pain and hurt that humanity is capable of inflicting upon each other is so dark, so twisted, and so wrong on every level that when it confronts you directly, the shock of it is so visceral that you almost want to vomit. This was a kid that everybody had thrown away—his parents had ditched him, leaving him with an elderly grandfather who later died. Foster care had no answers and no place to really call home, and so when he turned 18, he fled the system. Kids at school told him he was a disgrace to his species and didn’t look human. And the one person he’d ever met whom he hoped might actually care—a girl he met at the mall and started dating—had dumped him that night, and then her step-brother had finalized it by trying to punch out his lights.

Sometimes there are no words to give voice to the emotions of the soul as you listen to a story like this and realize that it could have been your own. Is he a pitiful, broken, wounded, whiney, groveling creature? Yes. He’s not perhaps the kind of person that it’s easy to love. But it’s these people—the ones that require a lot more grace to care about? It’s these people that the church is called to minister to—and it’s also these people that we’re best at ignoring, dismissing, and secretly despising just as the rest of the human race does.

It’s not possible to undo 18 years of garbage in two hours on a Friday night. I didn’t even try. He was hungry and cold, so we fixed that, and then he just listened as I explained the fallenness of the human condition, what it is that we are saved from, and what it is that we are saved to, and what it means to serve a God who has declared us to be of value—what it means to serve a God who loves us, holds us, protects us, nurtures us, disciplines us, sees us as we really are—and cares enough not to leave us there in our own filth.

And then I took him back to the apartment where he lives alone, and gave him my phone number, and promised him that I’ll walk with him through the process of whatever it takes to help him start getting some things straightened out, and getting him plugged into some kind of community that actually cares.

What really made my heart sick as I drove away that night was that he told me that he’d been going to one of the local Lynchburg churches for over a year—but that no one knows him there. And maybe no one really cares, I thought to myself with a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.

I recognize that it’s not socially acceptable to open our arms, our homes, and our hearts to society’s social outcasts. But if the church—claiming to represent the loving compassion of an accepting, forgiving, holy, and just God—refuses to love this subset of society…then my question is, who is left? The rather sobering question that’s been on my mind all morning is, who picks up the slack when God’s people refuse to act on their responsibility to be messengers of mercy, and make disciples of all men?

Liberty’s campus is relatively large—not so large, perhaps, as Duke’s campus, or Brown University, or something…but it’s biggerish. And parking is ridiculous…so in order to avoid the trauma of having to potentially find a parking spot more than once in a day? We walk. Everywhere. And doubtless, that is good for our characters and our cardiovascular systems, so no complaining on that note.

But yesterday, as I was walking from the cafeteria to the library, I was looking into people’s faces, like I always do when I walk, and I was struck—as I am frequently—by the fact that despite the fact that this is technically a Christian school, there is so much hurt in people’s eyes. And more than half the time, you can’t even catch the eyes, because the face is looking down—drawn, stressed, introspective, and insecure.

By the time I actually made it to the library, I could feel the tears welling up in the corners of my eyes.

“God, there’s SO much hurt here, even just on this campus. And we’re the ones that are supposed to have the answers, supposed to be offering hope—where do we start when it comes to mending the broken pieces of this generation, and what role do I—as the individual—play in this?”

It’s frighteningly easy for me not to care. In fact, for the last several months, despite the fact that I was technically doing everything right—spending time in Scripture, and praying for those around me, and being an active part of the church community and blah blah blah—I’ve kinda gone into survival mode, and I’ve had a growing sense of the fact that I was emotionally and spiritually disconnecting…that somehow, the truth that I was reading with the eyes of my mind wasn’t permeating to color the perceptions of my heart…and what I was doing with my hands wasn’t springing from a deep-seated sense of compassion or real caring.

It’s appalling how easily we can delude ourselves—and others—into thinking that going through the motions is the real thing.

God mercifully opened my eyes to the extent of my own callousness last week and gave me a glimpse of the direction in which my heart had turned in sort of an unexpected way. It was one o’clock in the morning, and I was sitting in a parking lot in a car, listening to a friend pour out some of the struggles of his soul…and suddenly I realized that this was the first time in weeks that I’d actively tried to care about somebody besides myself on any real level. And the realization was startling, and humbling…and as I sat there listening, I began to feel an overwhelming sense of shame. God doesn’t always speak in an audible voice, but sometimes…it’s almost audible:

“Thea, what on earth? How do you MISS it this badly for this long? How did you get so caught up in caring so much about what other people think of you, what other people are doing, and how they’re perceiving you that you lost three months of your life when you could have and should have been reaching out to people as they really are and caring for them as they really need to be cared for? Do you think I don’t know it when your heart isn’t with Me? Do you think I can’t sense your relational disconnectedness when your time with Me is just a ritual?”

As I drove home that night, the tears were rolling down my face and making little splashy tracks all over my steering wheel. The big plastic buttons on my coat probably thought it was raining. But somehow, the pain of God bringing us against the brick wall of a harsh realization is a pain that is redemptive, restorative, and freeing—and the tears were a good thing.

My prayer since then has been that God would keep my heart tender—that I would never become immune to the pain of others, that my eyes would never be able to ignore the needs, and that my heart would never be able to refuse to weep for those who are bleeding inside. It’s overwhelming to live this way. It’s beyond the handling capacity of my emotional and physical resources. But perhaps we were designed and called to live in a way that demands of us more strength than we have and more love than we are capable of giving so that we never come to the point of thinking that we no longer have a need for the One whose unending strength and infinite love have enabled men to do the seemingly-impossible since the beginning of the human race.

Thanksgiving. Giving of thanks. Noticing and appreciating the little things. Gratitude. Such simple concepts. Such an enriching way of approaching life. Such pathetically neglected and underused thinking in reality.

During the past week, as I was basking in the warm glow of being reunited at long last with my family after what feels like nearly a year of separation, I was challenged at times—usually by little things that people said or did—to ask myself if I have formed the habit of thankfulness, and whether I am actively cultivating a spirit of gratitude on a regular basis.

One instance in particular kind of stuck with me even as I deplaned on Virginian soil. See, I have two nephews and a niece, all of whom I am frightfully proud of, and five awesome siblings with two amazing additions by marriage—and often times, it is through one of these mediums that I am most forcibly reminded of my own need to sit back and reevaluate.

One of my nephews, Brock, is very nearly three years old. And he’s precious, and adorable, and possessed of a very compassionate and sensitive little heart. But as with most two year olds, he’s also very possessive of everything that he considers to be rightfully his.

I was a bystander one morning when he discovered that his baby sister, Lauren, was wearing a pair of his socks. Now, he had been running around barefooted all morning, and he had a different pair of socks stuffed inside of his little boots in case the notion to wear shoes might enter his tiny head, but somehow, all of this was completely irrelevant when it came to the fact that Lauren had been dressed in clothing items which he knew to be rightfully his.

“Mom,” he wailed, instantly very distraught, “did you think that maybe I would want my socks?!”

Ok, it was amusing. And yeah, I laughed. But then I had to do a quick double-take, and ask myself how often that kind of blatant selfishness characterizes my own thinking. The verse that came to mind was Proverbs 3:28, where Solomon or some other smart person is admonishing his readers, “Do not say to your neighbor, ‘Go, and come back, and tomorrow I will give it,’ when you have it with you.”

Maybe I’m not so much guilty of this one with my physical possessions…but with my time? Uf dah. Yeah, generosity in that area is a struggle, and I realized (a wee bit guiltily) that I definitely need to work on being more grateful for the time that people have chosen to invest in/share with me and to be more intentional in investing time in others.

On that note, I must say that over this particular break? I am especially grateful for the time invested by my tiny niece and new baby nephew, both of whom invested large quantities of sleep time and prodigious quantities of drool and baby urp in their oldest auntie. I miss it already, and I’ve only been back at school for half a week.