Tripping Over Artists & Kicking Against Gifts

I spent my first two years in campus ministry at a campus that was very different from what I had experienced as an undergrad. My move to Virginia Commonwealth University from the University of North Carolina was "un-smooth" to say the least.

My experience at UNC was (in my mind) the quintessential college experience: dorms, basketball, football, and the dangers of prolonged exposure to dining hall food.

VCU is a commuter campus in downtown Richmond. It's more famous for the art school (complete with all those quintessential trimmings: tattoos, spiked hair, and piercings where I thought God never intended piercings) than the football team (it had none).

I spent the first two years in a posture of fear, intimidation, disdain and antipathy. And it showed. The chapter went from fifty to fifteen in my first two years.

I spent those two years tripping, stumbling, kicking against the gift that VCU was to me. It wasn't what I was expecting. VCU wasn't what I thought I was going to get from God. So what was supposed to be a gift to me was my curse.

This is something of what Paul is talking about in 1 Corinthians 1:22-24:

For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, ²³but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, ²⁴but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.

Paul is asserting here that the Jews want God in one specific package (signs) and the Greeks want God in a different package (wisdom) and because they are so fixed on how God "should" manifest himself according to their definitions, they miss him.

And so the Jews and the Greeks both stumble over the gift of God crucified. It's not what they expected so they refuse to accept it. And so they miss God's gift.

Ladies and gentlemen, I think that many of us spend at least some portion of our lives kicking against the gifts that God has put in our lives, rather than graciously and humbly submitting to them, receiving them for what they are.

Perhaps you're doing it now. Think about it.