By: Michelle Day
This guest post is written one of my favorite new friends, Michelle Day. She is a part-time lecturer in the Composition Program at the University of Louisville and member of Crossing Church. Plus she is a killer sand volleyball player AND on my team so I like her a lot.
If you are also interested in guest posting on my blahg, see how here.
Trying to stand in my faith during college was a spectacular failure. That is why I was pretty excited to try again two years ago, when I started a graduate program in a humanities-related field at a public, secular university. I thought, “This is great. I will learn from my mistakes in college, commit to being the same person at church and at school, and the rest will be easy.”
Wrong.
As soon as grad school started, it seemed like church and school required me to be two completely different people. It felt like I had split personalities. Reading the Bible and Nietzsche in the same morning, or having back-to-back conversations with people who love and distrust feminism can do that to you.
What I realized was that
I was asking the wrong question. I was asking, “How can I be the same person no matter what context I’m in?” when I needed to ask, “How can I be a consistent person, one whose actions in any context are informed by my belief in Jesus?”
Actually, it doesn’t make any sense to think you can behave and speak
exactly the same in contexts with very different social practices; even though I’m a teacher, I don’t stand and give lessons at my community group or grade what people share. But you can adapt to any context in ways that are make sense given your identity in Christ.
In other words, the real question is,
“What does it look like to follow Christ in the humanities?” And to be honest, it’s not entirely different from asking what it looks like to follow Christ in my local church.
Consider the list below reflections on the work-in-progress the Lord has been doing in my heart on this issue over the last two years. They represent goals, not accomplishments, and I hope that they encourage any Christians in a similar position, wrestling with how to answer the bolded question above or any variation of it.
Don’t look for “THE answers,” because there’s not a set of reproducible answers to my question. I won’t find a life formula by thinking about it long and hard.
Instead, I need to be looking for Jesus in everything. Elisabeth Elliott says that we often look for
guidance from the Lord, but it’s more important to become someone who is
guided—someone whose heart is softened to truth and toward being led by the Lord. Along those lines, the Bible exhorts us to not lean on our own understanding—finding the answers—but instead acknowledge God in every situation, and He will make our paths straight (Proverbs 3:5).
Be honest about who you are up front. When I was in college, I usually kept my faith on the down-low until my friends who didn’t believe got to know me better, hoping they wouldn’t automatically associate me with negative stereotypes of Christians. But in graduate school, I adopted the opposite strategy. I let my beliefs come up naturally in conversation, but I do look for opportunities as quickly as possible to identify myself with Christ.
I feel like this allows me to be honest about who I am from the beginning rather than me feeling like I’m hiding. I also hope that it helps me be more authentic and set the stage for others to feel comfortable sharing their beliefs with me, because I love having those conversations.
Look for common ground. It’s tempting to assume that there’s not much crossover between environments dominated by different worldviews. But that’s just not true. And for me, conceiving of the academy and the church as
completely different made it that much harder to act and speak consistently. When I started finding similar language and ideas that the two environments use (even if they use them differently), it helped me bring my two worlds in conversation with each other, and it opened my eyes to how my studies and my church-related activities can inform each other.
Allow your beliefs to be challenged. Obviously, this one requires careful balancing. But
my faith in God has deepened because of things I’ve learned from people who don’t believe in Him. Because the humanities studies human culture, I’ve studied communication, how communities develop, and how people form identities through language, all of which are relevant to Christianity. But more than that, I’ve learned that people who believe differently than me can hold up a mirror to my beliefs, so I see, through another’s eyes, the assumptions I take for granted, the things I hadn’t thought about, or the ways I’m acting inconsistently. And THAT has unquestioningly helped me love God and people better.
Ask people you trust what they think, and ask them to hold you accountable in areas you struggle. Let’s be honest; there are very few important things that we can really handle without any help. I am blessed with many friends and family who are faithful to help me work through specific instances where I wrestle with how I should respond as both a Christian and academic. I have also been blessed with three other brilliant Christians in my program who all meet to discuss how our faith and studies inform each other. All of these conversations have been invaluable parts of learning to be a consistent person. It also helps when they lovingly ask me how I’m doing with the ways I am tempted to not act consistently with my faith.
Remember the two “greatest” commandments, and pray for the grace necessary to keep them. Figuring out how to stand in your faith when working in a highly secular (potentially even hostile) environment has to start with keeping first things first, and leaning into spiritual disciplines even more. Jesus says two commandments sum up all of them—loving the Lord with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength, and loving our neighbors as ourselves (Mark 12:29-31).
We are called to constantly seek, above all else, deeper relationship with the Lord, and show respect and love to people, who are all made in His image.
But the whole point of Christianity is that we can’t do that in our own strength. Instead, we are called to work out our faith with fear and trembling before God, no matter the circumstances, knowing that as we seek Him, it is really God who is working in us “both to will and to work for His good pleasure” (Phil. 2:12-13).
Why do you think Christians struggle with being a consistent person in different contexts? Anything you would add to Michelle's advice? Leave your thoughts...
