Reconciliation Week & Midterms

Quote of the Day: “Hamburgers are in bed with too much ambiguity.” — The result of my Organizational Behavior class playing a game of telephone to illustrate how information is lost in an all-channels communication network. The original message was, “Rumors arise when issues are important to us, ambiguous and arouse anxiety.”

I’ve got a long post for you today. I’ve had a lot going on the past few days, but first I want to give a little recap on Reconciliation Week like I promised.

Reconciliation Week ended on Saturday. To clue you in to what it’s all about, every year here at FSU for the past five years now we’ve had this thing called Resurrection Week. The past four years it’s been during Holy Week (the week before Easter) and it’s been a time for all the various campus ministries to come together, to be united.

This year some changes were made to the formula. The most obvious would be the name. Our theme this year was reconciliation (being reconciled to God and to each other, with a focus on racial reconciliation). Second, it’s much earlier in the year. It was moved up to the beginning of Lent rather than the end because in past years it has always been an incredible energizer for the Christian community, but once it ended there would only be two or three weeks of school let before the semester finished. Third, each year there has been 24/7 prayer going on in the Wesley ‘bomb shelter’ (for those not in the loop: their church is a monstrous gray building). In the past, each night of the week would feature a praise band from a different ministry and a speaker. This year, the prayer remained the same time and place remained the same, but there were only three nights of corporate worship (Tues-Thurs). Each night featured a praise band comprised of people from various ministries (no Navs though ). The speakers were excellent as usual.

There were ups and downs to this new formula. The ups would include a lot of BCMers turning on (mostly on Tuesday), which is something we haven’t seen in past years. Also, CSU participated because it wasn’t during Holy Week. Downsides included fewer people in the bomb shelter praying. I would go in there at times during the week (no late-night shifts this year though, too much school work) and there would be only five people in the whole building. That made me sad. But I think overall the change was good. Brent has ideas to make next year’s week better (including bringing in people form the International House of Prayer to lead the prayer). I think the theme helped start the healing process that most people, myself included, didn’t realize even needed to occur.

The verses that struck me the most this week came out of 2 Corinthians 5:14-21.

For Christ’s love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died. And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again. So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view. Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God. God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

This hit me in a lot of ways. First, I know that I am treating my friends who don’t know Jesus from a worldly point of view. Most importantly, it wasn’t until I read this passage that I really thought I had a part in this whole reconciliation process, or that there was something like this that we needed to be doing. Here we are just going with the flow, whether we’re actively racist or a preacher of tolerance, when we’ve been called to be ambassadors for Christ, not just to share the Gospel, but to be reconciled to Him and to each other.

My biggest fear is that after sitting and listening to the messages brought about this last week and saying “amen” where appropriate that we’ll forget. That it’ll be just a bunch of feel-good messages but that the hard work won’t get done. It’s not something that just happens. We need a plan and a purpose.

Okay, enough preaching. If you’ve been reading my away messages lately you’ll note that I’ve been pretty grouchy. Well, the reason is that I’ve been studying. A lot. I had two tests yesterday, one in Spanish and one in Religion & Science. Rather than pull an all-nighter on Monday night I decided to pull an all-morninger on Tuesday morning. I went to sleep at midnight, got up at 4 AM and studied from then until class time. Now, keep in mind, I had been studying over the weekend too, so this wasn’t just some cram session.

First, the Spanish test. The first two have concentrated heavily on verbs and grammar, but I had put a lot of study time into vocab. On Monday my professor gave a review session, telling us to take good notes because the test would look a lot like it. The review session is heavy on the verbs and light on vocab, as expected. The test, on the other hand, had 14 vocab questions! There were fewer than that on the first two combined! I felt really betrayed and angry at my professor. I really felt like she directed me poorly.

Second, the Religion & Science midterm. I really didn’t do too bad, but I flipped two things on the timeline. And I was thinking about switching them before I turned in the test but I didn’t. I probably also missed one or two other questions too. So this made me mad at myself. I really thought I was going to nail that test, and since it’s an important class for my major and the test is so heavily weighted I really wanted to do well.

So I came home and I was really irritated. Really, really irritated. I was tired too since I woke up so early. So I went to sleep. And I didn’t wake up again until 11:30 that night. When I woke up I was still tired, but I was feeling kind of sick too. So I took my regular meds and vitamins, took some other stuff to make me feel better, and went back to bed. I was up for a grand total of 5 minutes. I didn’t set an alarm for class for three reasons: I hadn’t done my Spanish homework, I wasn’t feeling well, and I didn’t want to deal with my professor. I woke up at 9 AM. I still felt sick and now I was feeling groggy. I dragged myself to my next two classes.

I’m glad that today (or yesterday) isn’t Thursday because I’m really not feeling social. I’m just trying to let my anger subside before I reengage totally. Hopefully things will begin to take a turn for the better.