1 Corinthians 15:10 – A Tuneup Tuesday
But by the grace of God I am what I am, and His grace toward me was not in vain. 1 Corinthians 15:10
The tagline for Tuesday's experience in my little sphere is applied after the fact by GK Chesterton in Heretics. He surmises, "In the attempt to be everything, the first and most difficult step is to be something." In one day, God showed me a lot about the something I am in Christ.
The day began, as many of them do, at some indeterminedly early hour with an impromptu after action report yesterday's events. This is otherwise known as insomnia. Little pricks from beginning a performance review on myself and a brief interaction with a student goaded me. Was I living up to the US Army's former slogan embedded since my childhood in my sense of self. Was I being all I could be, really?
My day job as a career coach involves counseling students when they are brave enough to inquire about the transition between school and work. When students are about other pursuits, I am making initial inquiries on their general behalf about internship possibilities. This lifelong academic and/or government bureaucrat isn't getting a resounding response from my initial proactive forays into the Real World.
When a student came with the subliminal, and not entirely unreasonable, expectation that we would have a list of internships ready-made for his next step in our new business program, I squirmed. When I went to Google to help us navigate this threshold, he mentioned that I was doing the same thing he was, I bristled. We all use the same tools, I condescended. Hopefully I could (insert self-important buzzword here) add value to his experience as we went along.
Was I being all I could be? The mute hours before the alarm went off wouldn't tell me, but with the self this earnest student reflected back to me the next day be any more satisfying? The theologian in me could rule that this time would be better used for prayer than such self-centered speculations. Invidiously, the habit of myopic self-examination is hard to break.
The first interaction of the day which wasn't with my wife, an unexpected one, didn't lift my introverted load. When my phone buzzed at quarter after seven with an unfamiliar number, I readied to adopt the cold tone needed to tell a telemarketer to buzz off. Instead, the caller was from the government, and she really was there to help.
My early morning caller noticed some inconsistencies in my application for Social Security Disability which could derail what she saw otherwise as a straightforward case. She wanted to provide the real, gracious, common sense human intervention I have so often, I hope, been used to apply in my working life.
So, at the time I'm usually most optimistic or most subject to forced optimism, focusing like a batter in the on deck circle on the task ahead, my focus was on my limitations. What couldn't I do? What was I having an increasingly hard time doing?
I blamed it on the brain, mixing Milli Vanilli and cerebral palsy. I explained to my listener the life with limbs that don't listen very well. I compared the cerebral palsy challenge to a radio signal which, by the time it reaches its target, is garbled with static. It takes a very strong signal, a lot of focus, eventually to the point of fatigue, to even hope to get the message where I want it to go.
I shifted from this unavoidable, helpfully intended, "I can't," to the, "maybe I can today," that the calendar offered or demanded. It turns out my morning appointment, the questioner of my Google technique from the day before, had more to teach me than I will ever have to teach him. Helping him develop a LinkedIn profile and then a resume, I went from understanding the dictionary definition of dyslexia to seeing it play out, protracted, in real time.
The brain I had been blaming, mine, which devours and fires off words with ease, enthusiasm, and facility, is not ubiquitous factory equipment for all of God's human creations. Watching someone who needed to ask Siri about the spelling of words I wouldn't have to think about and who was apparently grateful for the tools to do so reminded me where the gratitude well was in my own heart. As fearfully and wonderfully made human creations in the image of God, we have different gifts, and CS Lewis says we waste both them and precious time comparing them to one another.
God had given me enough Truth in this appointment to meditate on in repentant silence, but He wasn't finished. My supposed student critic came back, reflecting the a glow from our morning's work. Just by assimilating what he told me, emphasizing the qualities I saw by God's grace, and then polishing the phrasing in ways that were so easy for me and hard for him, I seemed to change how he saw himself.
He repeated again and again how much he liked the results, and he seemed to walk a little taller. My brain's wonky wiring, I was reminded, had a purpose after all.
In turn, coming from a worthwhile day's work, I was walking a little taller as well. , Or, I was, as a Sports Illustrated reporter once described Dan Marino as he interviewed him, strutting sitting down. Even my paratransit driver's introduction that his name was JP elicited my evangelical enthusiasm that I hoped it stood for Jesus Paid. I am bold on social media and in blog, but I'm a sheep of an evangelist in person.
Even so, Christ had been too good during that day to keep Him to myself. On our good days, or in our good moments on average days, the reality that Jesus paid, that we walk as Christians in His righteousness, takes on a textured meaning. We are consistently glad that He paid the price for our fellowship with Him in Heaven, but the good days here, the confirmations of His indwelling gifts, stir our gratitude a little more deeply.
I professed on. As I and my driver bantered Scripture back and forth on the way home, he was impressed enough, by God's grace, to ask me to text him some of the things I was saying or quoting. God does that often enough that I'm not entirely unaccustomed to that sort of response. I am, however, unused to having the tables turned on me, and quickly.
JP snuck up on me with a question as to whether I liked to bowl. I'm not sure if my sneer was audible, but I went to the safe ground of metaphor. I go to hang out with people who want to bowl, and at that I bowl a 300.
He wouldn't budge. "Do you bowl in the real world?" When I said I did not because I didn't see that there was much skill in simply, and very conspicuously, rolling a ball down a tube specifically set up so disabled people could say they could bowl, he let my pride reveal itself. It's grace to freshly know our gifts. It's intrusive grace when God uses someone to point out that we have defined ourselves entirely by His most obvious gifts in order to protect our ego.
Maybe he is a prophet for bowling, I thought. This being his hobby and evangelistic passion might give me one last chance to explain away God's use of his intrusion into my life. No sale. When I asked, JP said he had not bowled in years. His direction and directness in telling me that as a Christian I needed to put my passion for exposition and explanation where people gathered must have been Heaven's particular arrow for me.
The tagline for Tuesday's experience in my little sphere is applied after the fact by GK Chesterton in Heretics. He surmises, "In the attempt to be everything, the first and most difficult step is to be something." In one day, God showed me a lot about the something I am in Christ.
The day began, as many of them do, at some indeterminedly early hour with an impromptu after action report yesterday's events. This is otherwise known as insomnia. Little pricks from beginning a performance review on myself and a brief interaction with a student goaded me. Was I living up to the US Army's former slogan embedded since my childhood in my sense of self. Was I being all I could be, really?
My day job as a career coach involves counseling students when they are brave enough to inquire about the transition between school and work. When students are about other pursuits, I am making initial inquiries on their general behalf about internship possibilities. This lifelong academic and/or government bureaucrat isn't getting a resounding response from my initial proactive forays into the Real World.
When a student came with the subliminal, and not entirely unreasonable, expectation that we would have a list of internships ready-made for his next step in our new business program, I squirmed. When I went to Google to help us navigate this threshold, he mentioned that I was doing the same thing he was, I bristled. We all use the same tools, I condescended. Hopefully I could (insert self-important buzzword here) add value to his experience as we went along.
Was I being all I could be? The mute hours before the alarm went off wouldn't tell me, but with the self this earnest student reflected back to me the next day be any more satisfying? The theologian in me could rule that this time would be better used for prayer than such self-centered speculations. Invidiously, the habit of myopic self-examination is hard to break.
The first interaction of the day which wasn't with my wife, an unexpected one, didn't lift my introverted load. When my phone buzzed at quarter after seven with an unfamiliar number, I readied to adopt the cold tone needed to tell a telemarketer to buzz off. Instead, the caller was from the government, and she really was there to help.
My early morning caller noticed some inconsistencies in my application for Social Security Disability which could derail what she saw otherwise as a straightforward case. She wanted to provide the real, gracious, common sense human intervention I have so often, I hope, been used to apply in my working life.
So, at the time I'm usually most optimistic or most subject to forced optimism, focusing like a batter in the on deck circle on the task ahead, my focus was on my limitations. What couldn't I do? What was I having an increasingly hard time doing?
I blamed it on the brain, mixing Milli Vanilli and cerebral palsy. I explained to my listener the life with limbs that don't listen very well. I compared the cerebral palsy challenge to a radio signal which, by the time it reaches its target, is garbled with static. It takes a very strong signal, a lot of focus, eventually to the point of fatigue, to even hope to get the message where I want it to go.
I shifted from this unavoidable, helpfully intended, "I can't," to the, "maybe I can today," that the calendar offered or demanded. It turns out my morning appointment, the questioner of my Google technique from the day before, had more to teach me than I will ever have to teach him. Helping him develop a LinkedIn profile and then a resume, I went from understanding the dictionary definition of dyslexia to seeing it play out, protracted, in real time.
The brain I had been blaming, mine, which devours and fires off words with ease, enthusiasm, and facility, is not ubiquitous factory equipment for all of God's human creations. Watching someone who needed to ask Siri about the spelling of words I wouldn't have to think about and who was apparently grateful for the tools to do so reminded me where the gratitude well was in my own heart. As fearfully and wonderfully made human creations in the image of God, we have different gifts, and CS Lewis says we waste both them and precious time comparing them to one another.
God had given me enough Truth in this appointment to meditate on in repentant silence, but He wasn't finished. My supposed student critic came back, reflecting the a glow from our morning's work. Just by assimilating what he told me, emphasizing the qualities I saw by God's grace, and then polishing the phrasing in ways that were so easy for me and hard for him, I seemed to change how he saw himself.
He repeated again and again how much he liked the results, and he seemed to walk a little taller. My brain's wonky wiring, I was reminded, had a purpose after all.
In turn, coming from a worthwhile day's work, I was walking a little taller as well. , Or, I was, as a Sports Illustrated reporter once described Dan Marino as he interviewed him, strutting sitting down. Even my paratransit driver's introduction that his name was JP elicited my evangelical enthusiasm that I hoped it stood for Jesus Paid. I am bold on social media and in blog, but I'm a sheep of an evangelist in person.
Even so, Christ had been too good during that day to keep Him to myself. On our good days, or in our good moments on average days, the reality that Jesus paid, that we walk as Christians in His righteousness, takes on a textured meaning. We are consistently glad that He paid the price for our fellowship with Him in Heaven, but the good days here, the confirmations of His indwelling gifts, stir our gratitude a little more deeply.
I professed on. As I and my driver bantered Scripture back and forth on the way home, he was impressed enough, by God's grace, to ask me to text him some of the things I was saying or quoting. God does that often enough that I'm not entirely unaccustomed to that sort of response. I am, however, unused to having the tables turned on me, and quickly.
JP snuck up on me with a question as to whether I liked to bowl. I'm not sure if my sneer was audible, but I went to the safe ground of metaphor. I go to hang out with people who want to bowl, and at that I bowl a 300.
He wouldn't budge. "Do you bowl in the real world?" When I said I did not because I didn't see that there was much skill in simply, and very conspicuously, rolling a ball down a tube specifically set up so disabled people could say they could bowl, he let my pride reveal itself. It's grace to freshly know our gifts. It's intrusive grace when God uses someone to point out that we have defined ourselves entirely by His most obvious gifts in order to protect our ego.
Maybe he is a prophet for bowling, I thought. This being his hobby and evangelistic passion might give me one last chance to explain away God's use of his intrusion into my life. No sale. When I asked, JP said he had not bowled in years. His direction and directness in telling me that as a Christian I needed to put my passion for exposition and explanation where people gathered must have been Heaven's particular arrow for me.
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