The Bethany Sun

Bethany College Selah - January 17, 2011

Dear Bethany students, leaders who were out, new students, and all staff, faculty, and students who stayed back here. It is joy to welcome you here to gather and pause together, and a joy to speak words of blessing and challenge to you as you return and start again.

Here is a message that I posted on facebook, and some prayers that I have been praying for you while you were away, and that I will continue to pray….

While you are serving and learning and being a part of a team, be assured that we the Bethany community is praying for you. I am praying for miracles of all sizes, and spiritual breakthroughs in your lives. For a clear understanding of "how to serve", not in the mechanics necessarily, but in the motivation and attitude behind the doing. For a clear understanding of your gifts and some of the ways God wants to use them in you for his glory. For a clear understanding of putting aside your own rights, in order to love and put others ahead of your own convenience and comfort. For a clear understanding of being a disciple of Jesus first, and (fill in the blank) after that.

By the way, I would love to hear your stories and celebrate what you’ve learned. Stop by and tell me, or write me a note, or read me an excerpt from your journal.

Here is my challenge to you for today for this new start, Monday January 17…..

Do the work and pondering to make sense of what you’ve experienced. I’ll say it again, Do the work of pondering and thinking and journalling and discussing and praying and whatever you need to do to make sense of what you’ve experienced.

I think of Mary, in Luke 2.19 “Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart.” She pondered all her experiences until she absorbed them all, and they became a part of her. I think of Jesus, in Luke 5.16 “Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed.” He went away to a silent place to be with his Father….I think Jesus too was pondering all his experiences, and was making sense of the events of his life.

We are meaning-makers. We take the new things we encounter and we add them into our lives in a way that makes sense. Or they don’t get added. Think of your life and learning like a scaffolding of some sort, the worldview and the sum total of all your experiences. Each new experience needs to find a connection to what already exists, take time to make the connection. Sometimes even parts of the scaffolding need to be reassembled to add in the new learning, take time to do this rebuilding and renovating. You may have learned all kinds of things in the past two weeks wherever you were. You may have learned more about God, or about the world around you, or about yourself, or your team, or a combination of the above….take the time to reflect on it, and make sense of it, and make it a permanent part of you.

We all start a new semester today. I trust that you will take what you have learned in your past two weeks, and move forward in your walk with Jesus to be teachable, adaptable, and flexible.

I pray that you are more teachable than you were 2 weeks ago. Being teachable mean being ready and willing to be taught, to learn something new in any situation in any moment. It involves putting our pride aside, and picking up a humble spirit. Being teachable means being ready to listen and waiting to speak. It means being able to admit our inexperience in a new situation and be willing to step out into new things. How are you more teachable?

I pray that you are more adaptable than you were when you jumped in the van on January 6. It means to make suitable or fit for a new use of for different conditions. You have learned to work within a new team, with a new leader, in a new setting, new travel routes, streets, seeing a new or familiar city or area in a new way. You have been asked to fit with the host and the plan that was laid out for you. How are you more adaptable?

I pray that you are more flexible today than you were in 2010. This means being capable of being flexed, pliant, yielding to influence, resilient, springy, readily changed, not brittle or resistant. But flexible ready for action, agile. You have learned to be respond to changes in the plan, respect people around you even when you see your differences, live with the realities of serving in simple and sometimes unglamourous ways. How are you more flexible?

Before I close with a passage from Ephesians, let me say one more time, I urge you, take what you have learned to heart.

“For this reason, ever since I heard about your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all the saints, I have not stopped giving thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers. I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know him better. I pray also that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, and his incomparably great power for us who believe” (Ephesians 1.15-19).

With love and blessings,
LB