Newsletter No. 13

(Photo from a lecture I organized for our missions fellowship)

Last week, for the first time in years, I spent the 4th of July in the United States. It was a great day to be here, to listen to the 1812 Overture, and to reflect on my nationality. Of course, as irony would have it, I spent the day working. This is America, after all. But in spite of inconveniences like that one, my summer has been enjoyable, and, between you and me, I get the feeling that it constitutes the relative calm which precedes what may be a rather terrific storm.

For the first 3 weeks following my final exams, I was unemployed. That is to say, I needed a job desperately and didn’t have one. And that had never happened before. I hope it will never happen again, but the time was very thought-provoking and forced me to think about the horrible experience it must be for people who have families and mortgages to think about. During those weeks, I considered history’s solutions to the problem of unemployment: slavery (to pay the debt I owe), communism (to offer me a job), the welfare state (to pay me from another man’s work), and adultescense (to live off my parents, a luxury few have). None of those sounded especially enticing, and about the time I had been thoroughly sobered by thinking about it all, God provided me with a job.

I am normally rather pessimistic about one’s ability to see, in the short-term, “what God has been doing”, and avoid talking that way (to a fault). But given the options I had a short while ago, it is apparent to me that, at the very least, God spared me a lot of grief and depression by orchestrating my job hunt as he did. The thought of working from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. five days a week (the only job I could find) had begun to sound promising, and in retrospect I’m glad he closed that door.

At the present, there are two jobs vying for my time. The first and primary one is at a local Walgreens, just a mile down the road from my house. I can be found there regularly, helping customers and advising them to buy “The W brand, the brand America trusts.” The job allows for lots of chitchat with customers, a perfect complement to all the studying I do. And the second position involves proof-reading and editing a book being completed by my professor, Dr. Craig Ott, on the subject of church planting. He was one of the major reasons I wanted to come to Trinity, and it is a great honor for me to be helping him on this project now 3 years after coming.

In my spare time, I am completing applications for two ministry organizations and trying to finish my own first book, Haunted by Paradise. And as of late I have been fascinated with and playing a lot of jazz guitar. Pianist Scott Swingle and I hope to do some fun stuff in August, with me on vocals, so I’ll pass that along when we have it. I can’t wait.

This Fall, my last semester, will be light but full of fun stuff like my independent study, with Trinity historian John Woodbridge, on the topic of “the History of the German Church since 1800.” We’ve got neat things planned for Trinity’s missions fellowship too. I’ll be leading the group for one more semester and look forward to some great events. There should be more on that next time.

As I close, with all these opportunities and privileges on my mind, please pray that, in this last semester, my heart will catch up to my head so that I will be able to offer myself to any team or ministry as someone not only trained in but transformed by Scripture. The stories I heard all last semester about ministry failure and spiritual drift are not lost on me, so I would “covet” any prayer in that regard.

I hope you all have a great summer. Please contact me by email or phone if you have even the slightest interest in catching up. And as you’re soaking up the sun or enjoying a summer book, make sure to let every moment of your life be a moment of God’s story.

Ben

Judges 21:23