It has been one month, give or take.
What do I do? I sit on campus and talk with students as they also come to the coffee shop for coffee, or sometimes strangers make conversation with me!
Over the course of this month I have been meeting with freshmen girls who have ever shown their face at an RUF event. I get coffee with them at 8 AM before their class. I walk with them through Downtown/Colonial Williamsburg/ the oldest part of town where people wear dresses and petticoats and tip their hats at you when you walk by. We go get chocolate, and I learn about their family, their expectations for college, and which pets they miss from home. Sometimes, on special occasions, we go to Target.
It’s been terrifying and exciting. I basically jump into this world of William and Mary and act like I’ve been there all along, no fear, all confidence. Then I invite other people who don’t know what is going on to have an adventure with me. And become fast friends. Looking at it like that is overwhelming, and why I dreamed that I bought a one way ticket back to San Antonio to wander around my Alma Mater for the weekend to revisit fond memories and familiar faces.
What I have been learning this month is that people are all unique and circumstances don’t matter. One minute I am having coffee with a student who is out right not a Christian but he comes to a Bible study I also attend. I was reading Bonhoeffer’s Life Together when he came across me, and I was so excited about it that he asked me to read a sentence from it. I was taken-aback. So I read this sentence: “Human love is directed to the other person for his own sake, spiritual love loves him for Christ’s sake. Therefore, human love seeks direct contact with the other person; it loves him not as a free person but as one whom it binds to itself. It wants to gain, to capture by every means; it uses force. It desires to be irresistible, to rule.” He promptly responds, “That’s kind of a f*cked up thing to say.” I had to reorient my mind to realize people who are Christian think fundamentally different than those who are not. What is insulting to the world’s ears, can be enlightening and comforting to my ears. This world is not all there is, thank God.
I’ve met with a girl who, on our first coffee date, started crying and said she had no idea how she was going to handle everything this semester, but she is a new Christian and desperately wants to be involved. She is so busy, she is lucky if she can attend any RUF event any given week, so I do work with her Tuesday mornings at the coffee shop.
You could get whiplash doing this job. And this doesn’t account for how I’m feeling any given day. If I got my dishes washed, or if I have a clean towel, or if I’ve had a relaxing day off, doesn’t matter. I’m jumping in the deep end. The best part is that I have the best encounters with students when I feel like I just want to go home and I pray that the student cancels. When I am at my most frantic or stressed, that’s when God can use me to simply listen better, to ask more interesting questions, to genuinely laugh. When I am shaken, He is the firm foundation I can stand on. The trick is learning to realize that when I feel prepared and energize.
Lavished in Grace 