fixing my eyes on things unseen

I'm a fairly nostalgic person. I enjoy the little things in life. I like to reflect on the past. I like to categorize things by semesters and summers, figure out what the "song of the summer" was, label things as highs and lows.

As the end of the semester comes up, everyone seems to get a little nostalgic and reflective. I kinda teared up in two of my classes when my professors made little speeches. I had one crazy professor whose class I didn't really appreciate at all. But in the last class, he basically told us that we don't meet anyone who doesn't change us. Everyone is our teacher. And when he left the room, one girl called him an amazing person. Really? This guy who made rude comments to people in our class? How is he amazing? I thought. Then she told us how both his girlfriend and his son are paraplegic, and he works 2 jobs to take care of them.

I really do believe that you can love anyone if you know their story.

So anyways, I was a little disappointed in myself when someone asked me what I had learned this semester. Cause...I don't know. I feel like I haven't learned anything. I'm completely unchanged.

Is that really true? I'm sure it's not but I just don't see much change in my life when I look back oover the past few months. I feel like I've been living on one level, on the surface of life, and completely missing out on real life, the higher level.

I know several people who like to come pray in various places in the Chapel. I see them there regularly. I can never do that. I can't really sit around and pray on the clock, and I just don't choose to go there when I don't have to. There's this guy who does planning for remodeling in the Chapel. He's an old man with a faint islander accent and a good smile. He used to come in to do measurements and talk to me. One day he said, "I love coming in this place. It just feels so...holy, you know?"
I couldn't lie to him. "I guess so. It's just lost that feeling to me. Now it's just work." I felt terrible, like I had let him down and killed his dream.

I think that's what it's like in life. We see the same people regularly, some in the context of classes, some that live with us, some we work with. We just get used to them and turn them into their classes, their careers, their clothes. We judge people by their schedules, their hair, stupid things. This semester I have completely missed out on opportunities to live life more fully. In part because I haven't been seeing people through real eyes. People are not just what they do and say or where they go. Everyone has a deeper story that you're never gonna know unless you take the time to ask about it.

I just haven't done that this semester. I've lived in the mundane, not realizing that life and reality and pain and hope and joy are behind all the mundane things.

Here comes the Christmas reference...I had to, my mind is in Bethlehem lately:

The Son of God was born in a barn to a single young mother who everyone thought was cheating on her fiance. Okay, so that's a little more dramatic than mundane, but it doesn't sound too holy. It sounds trailer park.

Well, God is at work in the trailer park. He's at work in the hay, the stars, the Chapel, the person in my class who I don't talk to, and the classes I take. He's at work in the empty houses in New Orleans and the shoes that people left, the people who are left without families, the prayers of homeless people that no one else listens to. I need to see that.

I'm not trying to be trite or cheesy; I am just hoping that this will be an experience that will help take me out of the mundane and into the kingdom of God where I can actually be a force for hope and compassion in people's lives. I may have slacked off this semester, but winter should be good.

PS: I'm going to New Orleans to do reconstruction in the city and help out at Tulane and Loyola as they get started back up this winter. And I'm boosted.