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Chapel Address - May 5, 2008 Print E-mail
Thank you, Brian.  It’s good to see you all there.  I see some of you survived the weekend at Agape.  How many of you were out at Agape?  Good, good number.  At this time of the year, I often stop and ask students what should I talk about in chapel?  I had a conversation with this year’s and next year’s student body presidents Jana Morris and Keith Stuart this past week, asking what they thought were the issues that might be on students minds this year. And of course they thought about what might be on the minds of seniors.  Now I realize there may not be as many seniors here today as there might be on another day.  But they said maybe it would be helpful to talk a bit about what it means to make decisions, what it means to follow God’s will.  Maybe it would be helpful to talk about how you wrestle with things like jobs, and marriage and just making decisions, especially they said since this year has been a year full of big decisions, for me.  It is certainly true with regard to Hogue Hall that there are big decisions ahead of us, even in the next couple of weeks.  So I thought a bit about that and I thought about what it means to consider what vision really is all about. Ten years ago this year when I arrived in Greenville, I spoke on the topic of vision.  I made the comment then that sometime it’s hard to see because there is too little light, and sometimes it’s hard to see because there is too much light.  You all know how that works.  If it’s dark and there is literally nothing around to illuminate the situation, we can find ourselves feeling our way with our hands as our vision is limited.  I know some of you have probably been in that situation recently when the power went off.  I know every faculty member in the Library now in the basement is told to make sure they have a flashlight handy on their desk.  When the power went off last week, I saw people showing up at appointments carrying their flashlights, putting it on the desk right with their bottle of water.  It’s difficult to have vision when there is too little light.  But you know it’s also difficult to have vision when there is too much light. Plato talks about how people coming out of a cave where they have learned to move in the shadows.  If they come into the light of the sun, often they’re blinded and can’t really see well at all.  Education sometimes gives us too much light and we’re perceived by others as being blind.  “How in the world can these people be smart when they have no ability to see in the world?”  So sometimes where there is too much light our eyes are dazzled and we can’t see where we are going. 

But we certainly need vision.  In Proverbs 29 we’re told that “where there is no vision, the people perish”. When you have no vision you have to ask if you run the risk of perishing?  And so I would like to talk today about how we need help in those situations where we feel that we lack vision, where perhaps there is too little light or perhaps there is too much light.  We need what I like to call God’s Providential Spirit, God’s GPS. 

Would you bow your heads with me in prayer. 
Lord may the words of my mouth and the meditations of our heart be acceptable in Your sight O’ Lord, our Strength and our Redeemer.  Amen.

I have been flying a lot recently literally tens of thousands of miles to Africa, to Europe, to both coasts, California probably four times, three times in the last couple of months, even to the East coast two or three times.  So I’m finding myself on an airplane a lot.  Probably 20 – 30 flights in the last eight weeks.  I remember just a few weeks ago coming in over Atlanta heading to a meeting with our Board of Trustees, Trusteeship Committee, and we were at about 36,000 feet, it was a beautiful day with blue sunny sky there up above as many of you know.  You could look way, way down and you could see a solid blanket of clouds.  And they were very puffy.  I remember noticing they looked like an egg crate, very puffy, they were just uninterrupted.  It was a constant egg crate pile of cotton ball clouds as far as the eye could see which must have been oh no doubt it was two hundred, two hundred and fifty miles.  Then the voice came on the intercom and it said “ladies and gentlemen please fasten your seatbelt, put your seats back in the upright position, close your tray tables, as we prepare for our landing”.   And I thought to myself looking out that window, “How in the world does this guy know where, in which of those cotton balls to come down?”  I was just struck by the amazing ability for the pilot to have “vision” in the middle of a situation where it seemed there was no mark to tell him where to go. 

Then my thoughts went back a couple of years ago to when I flew from Los Angeles to Chicago.  I remember it was a big plane and it was at night.  It was evening, we took off, and we flew I suppose it was three hours, four hours….. I forget how long the flight is.  But in those days, (I don’t think they have them anymore, maybe it’s the threat of terrorism), there were video screens in the cabin that not only showed where you were on the map, but actually showed the view from a camera in the cockpit directly behind pilots.  It was really cool.  Once again I can remember that the voice came on the intercom and said, “Ladies and Gentlemen, please pull your seats back in the upright position, close your tray tables as we prepare for landing at O’Hare Airport in Chicago”.  Then the screen lit up and you could see very faintly illuminated the head of the pilot on the left and on the right the head of the co-pilot; at least I hope they weren’t just plastic dummies.  You could see their heads vaguely illuminated, and in front of them you could see nothing but black, just black.  The plane came down, and down, and down.  You could tell.  I heard the flaps go down and I know that’s part of the process, then you could feel the plane slowing down, it was a huge plane loaded with people, lower and lower, and eventually you heard the crrrrr and the opening doors and you could hear the landing gear drop down.  You could hear the whistle of the wind through those tires and I thought, “Wow, it’s black out there!  Where are we?  What can they see?”  Next I can remember we waited, and waited and I could begin to feel the plane flying so slowly  and eventually, you know, just before a plane lands it flares, where you pull up the stick, I felt the plane begin to flare.  I could see in front of the pilot it was STILL black.  Then all of a sudden (clap) boom, right on the screen, bright as day, were the streaking lights of the runway.  I counted one, two, three - boom, we were down.  I thought, “Oh my goodness, imagine the pilot bringing 200 passengers clear across country in the darkness, not able to see a thing out the front, to trust, to put down the flaps, to slow that plane down, to drop the wheels, to flare the plane – it wasn’t going to fly much longer unless he did something else.  One, two, three – boom and we were down.” 

Last year when I flew to Africa, I remember something similar.  We flew from New York City.  It was a night flight and we were due to arrive in Johannesburg  the next morning.  Sometimes when you fly from New York or Atlanta to Johannesburg, it’s a fourteen hour flight non-stop.  But it often depends upon the prevailing winds so if the winds are wrong they use up too much fuel and have to stop somewhere.  You never really know for sure if they are going to have to stop until it happens.  So on this night we were all sound asleep, it was probably three or four o’clock in the morning, and the plane began to come down lower, lower, lower.  You knew we were landing.  And sure enough, before you realize it you look out the window and you could glimpse one or two lights and “Boom!” we were on a runway.  We landed.  We landed in Cape Verde Island.  Cape Verde Island is right off the coast of Senegal, just a couple hundred miles into the ocean from Dakar.  Once again I was amazed that after six or seven hours of flying, in the middle of the night over the Atlantic Ocean where there were not a whole lot of places to land, the pilot could pick out and find an island that was maybe ten miles wide, just a speck of dust in the middle of all that water.  I thought to myself again, “How in the world can this be done?” 

Well I guess sometimes our lives are like that.  We go flying through the air, there is a lot of darkness, it’s not very clear where were going, and the question is, “How do we get to where we want to go?”  Now in the case of the airplane, I think most of you know the way it works.  Part of the process is to use radio signals and VORs and all kinds of stuff  like that.  But another thing that pilots often use especially nowadays is a system called a GPS.  I wish I would have brought my portable GPS with me.  I have a little portable about that big, in fact I also have a GPS on my phone.  People accuse me of  having all my brains on my phone, including my schedule, my contacts, my Bible, a web browser, and city maps of all of Europe and all the United States.  I wish I’d brought mine, but I’m sure most of you have seen a portable GPS.  Maybe you have one yourself, maybe your parents have one that they mount on the windshield at the front of their car.  Some are built in and some of course you can carry around with you.  They’re great, even hikers use them when they’re hiking.  I think most of you know how they work.  Global Positioning Satellite System.  It’s a system that tells you where you are and has built in maps so it can tell you how to get from point A to point B. 

Now I’m fond of saying that a GPS is very much like a Christian Liberal Arts Education, surprise, surprise, right?  I am fond of saying that because a GPS does a couple of things for you, just as a Christian Liberal Arts Education does at least a couple of things for you.  First of all both have a practical value, and second both have an intrinsic value.  You’ve heard me talk about these values of education before.  The practical value is that a Christian liberal arts education equips you to go out and serve.  But it also has an intrinsic value; it helps you to become a better person inside. 

But how are these like a GPS?  Obviously the practical value of a GPS is that it helps you to get from point A to point B, very valuable, very practical.  This is like the practical value of education that hopefully gets you from a zero salary to a salary you can live on. In other words, both get you from point A to point B.  But  a GPS also has an intrinsic value.  In at least a small way, it helps you to become a better person.  Let me explain.  When I was driving down I-70 to St. Louis, two or three years ago, I was looking at the map on my GPS.  I just glanced over at it and it showed the road, but then, to the left, it showed this blue patch.  I thought to myself, “Blue? That’s a lake!  There’s no lake over there!”  So I took my eyes off the steering wheel, off the road long enough to look over and peek between the trees and sure enough, there was a lake over there!  I had never seen that lake before.  The GPS had just given me a new perspective on the world that I had not had before.  Oh, of course, maybe that knowledge of that lake over there, maybe that perspective that I now had, wasn’t going to make me get to St. Louis any faster, maybe it wasn’t going to increase my salary, maybe it wasn’t going to make me more useful to the people that I work for, but it gave me a new perspective.  It helped me to know the world and understand the world in a way that I hadn’t understood it before.  So then, like a liberal arts education, a GPS has a both a practical value and it has an intrinsic value.  It helps you to do things better, and it helps you to become a better person.  And of course you’ve heard me say that I think those twin values are what a Liberal Arts Education is all about.  But there is one more parallel.  The neat thing about a GPS is HOW it does both of those things!  How?  By “talking to the sky!”  The GPS can’t get you from point A to point B unless it’s in constant communication with at least three satellites that are thousands of miles above our heads.  And so, also like a Christian Liberal Arts Education, it helps us in both of those ways by communicating with heaven. 

I’d like to stretch your thinking a little bit today, about God’s will.  And it may turn out that you disagree with me!  It could turn out that I’m wrong about this!  But I’d like to suggest that God’s Providential Spirit leads us and guides us in His ways, in some ways that are similar to that of a Global Positioning Satellite. 

First of all, a GPS doesn’t tell you where to go, it only guides you, once you’ve decided where you want to go.  A GPS doesn’t tell you where to go, it only guides you, once YOU’VE decided where you want to go.  You have to tell it where you want to go.

Secondly, a GPS understands, “knows” if you will, that there are multiple ways to get from point A to point B.  That is, from where you are to where it is you say you want to go.  So you have a decision first about where you want to go and then you have decisions to make  about how you want to go about getting there.  I don’t know about your GPS, but mine, when you put in the destination it says, “Do you want to go the fastest way?  Do you want to go the shortest way?  Do you want to go the cheapest way?”  It always asks you, at least mine does, if you want to pay tolls.  “Do you plan on walking?”  In that case one-way streets don’t really bother it very much.  “Would you like a scenic route?”   So in addition to telling it where I want to go, it asks me, well, “How do you want to get there?”  I have a second set of decisions to make. 

I remember when Ellen and I were in Europe in the Fall of 2006, I had my GPS going and we were driving from our home on Lake Maggiore in the town called Pallanza, and wanting to go over to Como, on Lake Como.  I thought to myself, “I don’t want to go a boring way!  All these gorgeous Swiss mountains around!”  (You actually go thru Switzerland to get from that part of Italy to the other part of Italy.)  So I thought, “I’m just going tell it to take us the shortest way so I don’t go down through Milan, and up the highways! Take us the shortest way!”  Well it took us the shortest way alright.  At one point Ellen looked over at me and said “Are you sure we should do this?”  We were driving on two tracks through a cow field with animals on both sides of us.  It was obviously some farmer’s road.  Now how the system knew that road was actually open and passable I’ll never know.  But we got there! It took us forever!  But it was the shortest way to get from Palanza to Como. 

In California just a few weeks ago, I asked the GPS, “Please take me to Laguna Beach.”  And I guess I figured it wouldn’t matter if I paid a toll because, you know, it’s only a fifteen minutes drive.  Well eight dollars later, I got to Laguna Beach.  I’m not sure I got there that much faster, but it certainly cost me a lot of money. 

In other words, after you’ve told the GPS where you want to go, you have a second set of choices, about how you want to get there.  Shortest, fastest, cheapest, scenic, walking, there are multiple paths that you can get from point A to point B. 

Thirdly, and finally there’s a feature about a GPS that’s very useful to me, and that is that it constantly recalculates.  It constantly adjusts.  Ellen and I used to go every Sunday afternoon to Cool Cats in Highland.  Anyone been to Cool Cats?  Good, a couple of you.  You should try it out. It’s a 50’s place where they play Elvis music and all that kind of stuff.  But we would go.  She loved the milk shakes.  We would just head out of town, we would put Cool Cats in the GPS as our destination, and then we would just start driving.  We’d drive south across through the farm roads.  When we’d get to an intersection, she would say “left” or “right” and we’d go right, or left, whatever she said.  And if it didn’t happen to be the path that “Ditzy”, that is the name Ellen gave to our GPS, had chosen, Ditzy would pipe up in whatever accent we’d chosen to use during that period--sometimes it was a British accent, and sometimes it was a Southern accent, and sometimes it was in Portuguese--and she’d say “Off course, recalculating!”  And then she’d come up with a new approach, a new set of directions.  Then of course at the next intersection a mile away, Ellen would say “left or right” and we’d turn and go that way and if it wasn’t the way Ditzy had in mind, she’d again say “Off course, recalculating!”  On one occasion, we were supposed to turn right and I just went straight, “Off course,” next mile, “Off course,” she just kept recalculating.  But every time she’d recalculate I’d ignore that too.  Not on purpose, it’s just that we were free!  Ellen piped up and said, “You know they really ought to program that thing differently.  They ought to make it so after the third “Off course, recalculating,” the voice comes on and says “Ok, I give up, you do it your way!” 

But you know, God’s will, and knowing God’s will may be like a GPS.  It may be God’s Providential Spirit.  That’s because, in the first place, we choose the end goal, then He guides.  This may be a challenging thought to you.  Consider that it could be that God does not have a detailed will for us, x, y, and z at every moment.  It may be that God’s will for us is fairly general, fairly basic. Romans 12:1 – 2 says “I beseech ye therefore brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy acceptable unto Him, which is your reasonable, logical service.”  And then comes the verse that you hear me quote a lot, a verse which I think Greenville is all about.  “Be ye not conformed to this world, but be ye transformed, by the renewing of your minds”.  So in a sense if God has a will for us, it’s pretty simple, pretty basic.  He wants us to be transformed. 

But now if you believe that, the first question that should pop into your mind is, “Transformed to what?  How transformed?  From what I am to what?”  And I think the answer is pretty obvious, He wants us to be transformed into the image of Jesus Christ.  Do you believe that this morning?  He wants us to be transformed into the image of Jesus Christ.  He wants us to follow Christ.  It seems to me as though that’s the real choice we make.  Just like in my GPS, I have to say where I want to go.  In having vision about what God wants me to do it’s not a matter of deciding if I’m suppose to go to this job or to that job, or to this event or that event.  The goal that I put into God’s Providential Spirit system, if you will, is the goal of being transformed into the image of Jesus Christ.  That’s the choice that we have to make.  Have you decided in your life, that that is your mission?  That that is your goal?  That that is your purpose?  Have you decided this morning that more than anything else in your life, you want to be transformed into the image of Jesus Christ?  Is that what you have punched into your GPS? 

If you have, then God will guide you.  But how?  You then have a second choice to make, I suppose, it’s very much like Ditzy.  You have to ask, “Is there just one way to be conformed to the image of Jesus Christ, given who I am?  Given where I am?”  I think the answer is no.  You have to choose, you have to choose whether you want a route that follows this direction or that set of priorities or this set of priorities.  In other words, you have another choice to make.  Then of course, God in His providence will constantly recalculate for you what it means in that moment, having made the choices you have, given who you are, to be transformed into the image of Jesus Christ.  What a freeing, what a liberating thing it is.  Ellen and I always felt that Ditzy was liberating because we could wander all over the area, all over 20 counties, and never felt lost.  Because we had already told Ditzy where we wanted to get and now we could make choices about scenic, or cheap, or fast or short.  And Ditzy would get us there. 

So that leaves only a practical question.  After we have made these choices, first to conform to the image of Christ, and then the free and liberating decision about how to pursue that goal, how do we decide which specific turns to make at a given moment. 

Let me close by offering four practical suggestions about how you make those decisions once conforming to Christ’s image is ingrained, is punched into your GPS.  Very briefly, we have to accept the reliability of the Source, we have to trust.  Second, we have to keep in contact with the sky, we have to connect.  Third, we have to act, we have to do something; i.e. we have to make a turn or in other words we have to choose.  Fourth, we have to be patient, we have to wait. 

First, briefly, we trust.  We have to trust that the system “knows” and is reliable.  When I was at MIT I lead a Bible study and one semester we were talking about God’s will.  I remember one night an non-believer came and sat around the fringe of our study.  As we were talking about God’s will he said, “You Christians are funny people.  If God is really who you say He is, then you shouldn’t have to worry about what His will is, all you should have to worry about is whether you’re willing to accept it, whatever it is.  So this first step of trusting, it seems to me, is to accept the reliability of God’s Spirit, accept the fact that God will bring you to the image of Jesus Christ in your life, if you have made that your goal.  Consider what the options are before you this morning in job or in marriage.  Consider whether we should take down Hogue Hall or remodel Hogue Hall.  Ask if we can trust God to bless us, to bless us regardless which turn we make between here and Cool Cats, regardless of which turn you make vocationally.  Do you believe God can bless you regardless?  Are we willing to accept alternative paths?  

This I believe is one of the hardest things for young people to do today.  So many of you have been raised by well-intentioned parents who have perhaps scheduled your lives to the hilt.  On Tuesdays it was soccer, on Wednesdays it was youth group, on Thursdays it was violin lessons, on Saturday it was Swimming lessons.  It was a “perfect plan” designed to get you ahead, to give you an edge, to “get you into Harvard.”   So it’s hardly a wonder you might think that your heavenly Father has a perfect plan.  But too often the result is fear, not joy and freedom.  It’s fear that if you “miss a turn,” or skip a step, you’ll be “Out of the plan” and doomed to regret it for the rest of your life.  I may be wrong about this, but it seems to me that life in the family of God is not about fear.  Instead it’s about the freedom to drive to Cool Cats in many ways, knowing that God’s Providential Spirit is keeping an eye on us, knowing where we are, knowing where we’ve decided we want to go, then constantly giving us the best Heavenly advice possible, adjusting to our circumstances and to our choices. 

Second of course we must stay connected.  If I don’t keep my GPS in a place where it can see the sky, it’s not going to help me at all.  To take advantage of God’s Providential Spirit, we must take time for prayer and listening to the quiet voices in our life, in the Word, and in other people’s thoughts. 

Third, we must choose, stepping out in confidence.  I drive to Cool Cats with confidence. I know that Ditzy knows where I want to go and I know that Ditzy knows the lay of the land.  Step out in confidence and make a move.  One of the most frustrating things about a GPS is it won’t give you a reading unless you are moving.  I have been so annoyed many times when I have stopped in a gas station and I have forgotten which way I came from; i.e. which way I’m going.  I sit there at the pump asking myself which way do I turn when I leave.  But Ditzy doesn’t tell me a thing.  For her to help me, I’ve got to get out of the station and make a turn.  Maybe it’s even a wrong one and eventually I hear “Recalculating.”  But to get any help, I have to move.  In fact sometimes instead of leaving the station, I just pull forward and backward in the gas station to get enough motion so that Ditzy figures out where I am.  You’ve got to make choices, so you have to trust, which is to say accept the reliability of the source, you have to connect making sure you are in communication with the sky, but then you’ve got to choose – to step out in confidence. Don’t be paralyzed by your analysis, do something. 

Fourth and finally be patient and wait.  The route, the right path, often is not obvious.  Last week Dr. Hartley spoke to us in our faculty/staff final communion, and reminded us that we are these days in the Church calendar between the time of Christ’s Ascension and the time of Pentecost.  In that time, the disciples felt alone.  The people of God felt abandoned.  He was gone!  What were they to do now?  And the Spirit had not yet come.  What do you do when you’re at a “moment between?”  The disciples were told to pray and to wait.  To pray, to stay connected to the sky, and then to wait. 

At the beginning of the academic year I always talk about a “moment between.”  Do any of you remember me talking about a moment between?   None of you probably, that’s the way those speeches go.  But at a communion service at the beginning of each new year here at G.C., where we gather all new students and their parents in the round, I talk about how the people of God, found themselves at a moment between.  They had been released from captivity in Babylon and were now empowered (interestingly enough considering our situation with Hogue Hall) to build a building and a wall.  But they became frightened and afraid and didn’t know what to do.  In that situation, they were afraid, but what they did was to trust, by remembering the King’s permission and protection and provisions.  They connected.  They checked the Medo-Persian archives, just as we should look at the Word.  There they saw what the promise had been.  They remembered God’s providential spirit. Then they chose, by acting to begin again.  And finally they were patient and waited, in their case 70 years, about as long as our lives.  Sometimes after trusting, connecting, and choosing we will still not see clearly God’s leading.  But with patience we can, like the pilgrim on the stern of the ship, look back and see plainly that God has indeed been leading.  

And so I encourage you this morning if you want vision for the future, to trust, to connect, to choose, and then to be patient, so God’s Providential Spirit will guide you if you’ve “punched in” the goal of conformation to the image of Jesus Christ. 

Will you bow your heads with me… Heavenly Father, this morning as we come to the end of another academic year, there are many perhaps in the sound of my voice who are reflecting on direction for their life. They’re wanting vision.  Oh, Lord I pray this morning that You would teach us to trust in You.  I pray that You would remind us that You are utterly, utterly reliable.  I pray that you would give us the freedom to let go and to accept what Your will may be for us,  whatever choices we may make.  Lord I pray that you would allow us to see that the fundamental question is to make it our purpose in life to be transformed into the image of Jesus Christ.  And having made that decision, then to enjoy the freedom of the children of God.   To act and to move as long as we trust, and connect, and choose, and are patient.  O Lord, thank you for the privilege of being a part of Your family.  Thank you for the freedom and the confidence we have that Your providential spirit will watch over and protect each and every one of us.  And that we don’t need to strain for Your will for us at every moment.  We pray these things in the powerful name of Jesus.  Amen. 

 
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