Saddle up Your Horses!

A couple weeks ago I had a moment. It was a stunningly relaxed, balmy summer Sunday, and I was taking full advantage of it, lying on my bed and listening to a CD of beautiful Christian rock I had borrowed from my digsmate. There it hit me: There's no other place in the world where I'd want to be than right now and right here with God. There's no other life I'd rather live than the one I'm living now with him. It's the great adventure of following Christ.

Now to understand this moment of mine fully, we need to back up to last year, when I was doing something pretty ordinary, writing an advertisement for a Christians @ Rhodes term service to send out to a general student mailing list. A little while later, I got a reply from the list administrator, a powerful official in the Dean of Students' office, saying that she'd seen my advert and wanted to know if we could advertise a march that the Dean of Students division was organising for right after the service. I said I'd look into it, and we did announce the march at the service. I was the only one who went through to it. It wasn't hugely meaningful for me; I don't even remember what it was for.

But the official in the Dean of Students' office now had my email address, and I'd established some kind of vague contact with her. Now you must understand that the Dean of Students division and the Christian community on campus have traditionally not been seen to have a great relationship, due to a bit of a sour history. So I was very surprised when this official emailed me a couple weeks ago, asking if Christians @ Rhodes would like to co-host an event with them as part of Anti-Alcohol Abuse Week. I thought it was a great idea, and the rest of the leadership team agreed.

Meanwhile, Joe, the Isaiah 26:8 society chairperson, had emailed me in December about the possibility of Christians @ Rhodes negotiating with the other Christian societies about doing a joint programme of Orientation Week evening events. In the past, each society had just done their own thing to reach out to first-years during Orientation Week, leaving us open to criticisms that we were just recruiting for our own societies, which according to the Dean of Students division was a no-no. I thought it was worth a try to organise a joint programme, so I went ahead and started talking with the other societies about it.

Unfortunately, by the time everyone woke up to the new year, some societies' O-Week programmes were already in place, and so we weren't able to organise one combined event for every night of the week as we had hoped. Instead, I thought of designing one poster with all the societies' activities on it, so that people could get the picture that we were working together and not trying to compete with each other. Everyone was enthusiastic about this idea.

Then when I got to Grahamstown, I scheduled an appointment with a couple of pastors to talk about the plans for O-Week. One pastor told me that he'd been pleading unsuccessfully with the official in the Dean of Students' office to let his society advertise their events on campus. However, the official said to him that if Christians @ Rhodes wanted to put up a poster, we would be allowed to do it. He suggested that we add a combined Christians @ Rhodes event to the poster as well, to make it look less like Christians @ Rhodes advertising what the different societies were doing, and more like an O-Week programme that we were sharing with the societies. I told him that I'd speak with the official and see what she'd let us get away with.

I must admit I was rather nervous, and took a good amount of prayer and false-starts before I could go up to her office and speak to her. But when we chatted, I talked about the usual animosity that there seemed to be between the Dean of Students division and the Christian societies around O-Week, and said I thought there was a way we could co-operate. I told her about the idea of the joint poster and combined event, and said I could negotiate with the societies to try to prevent clashes between their events and the official Dean of Students/SRC events. She not only allowed us to put up a poster, but also said that she would be happy for her office to stick it up in all the university residences! I thanked her, and struggled to keep my cool until I was safely out of the building. But once I was outside, I had to shout and sing and dance around for joy. With the bad vibes that usually seemed to exist between us and the Dean of Students division, this was a miracle!

So two days later, I found myself on my bed listening to music and thinking through all this. I laughed to myself, hardly believing that somehow I had gone from negotiating between the Christian societies to mediating between the Christian community and the Dean of Students division, and that now the official I had feared for so long was offering to stick up our posters for us! These are things that only God can do.

And I thought, "What other kind of life would I be living? What could be more of an adventure than this? What work is there that satisfies like serving God?" As I said to a friend a couple of nights later, I know I haven't arrived yet. I have so much still to learn, so much to surrender to God. But I know I'm on the way there, and the journey is literally incredible! God is on the move here.

And so, as an old Steven Curtis Chapman song goes, it's time to saddle up our horses and ride out into the wild unknown of God's grace. Who knows what we may find this year?