A New Season

Here I am back in East Tennessee with the mountains, the humidity, the crazy drivers and the UT orange. Though it appears that some things never change, I’m beginning to realize that everything does.

A speaker in chapel last week said, “God is a God of progress.” Isn’t that true? Time is always going; it never takes a breather. The earth is always rotating, the seasons are always changing, and I’m finding that I myself seem to be constantly growing. I feel like a book that after trying and failing for too long to write itself into a best-seller, finally gave in to a much more experienced revisionist--God.

I am not who I was a year ago. To give you just one example, I remember sitting in the library with my cousin last Fall and saying that I sometimes seemed to lack the emotion and sympathy I felt I should have—that all too often I felt like my heart didn’t break for what broke God’s. How was it that I could listen to stories of horrible tragedies and not shed a tear? Yesterday I found myself saying, “Why am I always so emotional? How is it that I can’t listen to one story or sing one song without crying?”

I’ve been reading about Mother Teresa lately and have been inspired by her love for people. She loved people with great intensity. She viewed each person in need as though he was Jesus Christ himself. “He is the hungry one. He is the naked one. He is the thirsty one. Each is Jesus in a distressing disguise.” She believed that people hunger for love more than for bread, and that love was the greatest gift we could give to people. It’s not always easy to love, but I believe God is more than willing to transform our hearts and fill us with an unworldly desire to put others above ourselves. If it’s not from God, then our love seems to have selfish motives. We only love with agenda and with hopes of gaining something in return.

Mother Teresa said, “The success of love is in the loving-it is not in the result of loving. Of course it is natural in love to want the best for the other person, but whether it turns out that way or not does not determine the value of what we have done.”

I am no Mother Teresa, but I feel like my heart is undergoing surgery where there are blockages being removed in order that I might love without restraint. It might be a very long, tedious surgery.

Last semester changed me. I am still changing. It will be a life-long process of change. But I suppose that if God is a God of progress, then a stagnant life would be no life for a Christian. So here is to change, growth, and new season.