The length to which God goes to capture our attention amazes me. Everywhere I turn this semester, I find the theme of thankfulness. Thankfulness on the sweet days and the slow days, the sad days and the scattered days.
In her recently popular devotional “1,000 Gifts,” Ann Voskamp writes essentially about God and thankfulness. For Voskamp, God can be found in anything: the ugly, the chaotic, the mundane. Somewhere around devotional six, she mentions the significance of the Greek word eucharisteo, which is the ancestor of our word eucharist. The original Greek also contains the roots of the words for joy and grace, chara and charis. Her point is that we find the grace and joy of God when we first give him thanks for his gifts, which appear everywhere. They permeate daily life, if we have the eyes to see and the heart to voice thanks.
The second place I happened upon this theme of thankfulness was in a telephone interview I conducted with Al Haley, writer in residence and English professor at Abilene Christian University. Haley was commissioned to write a poem for the College of Arts and Humanities, and I interviewed him to get to know him a little bit. I asked him several questions about his prolific writing, including, “Is there a subject that repeatedly comes to you or appears in your writing often.” Haley’s response stunned me. “I’m looking for the presence of God,” he said, echoing Voskamp’s purpose. “I know that sounds lofty, but I am looking for moments when God breaks through what we think of as mundane ‘reality.'”
Haley’s poem, titled “The Task,” discusses the increasing importance and relevance of Christian higher education. He read his poem at Thursday night’s COAH event, which was a special evening of celebration and commemoration.
That phrase, “Christian higher education,” sounds lofty. Through these past weeks — planning for the COAH celebration, interviewing Haley, reading “1,000 Gifts” — that phrase has been ruminating in my thoughts. I have come to a fairly simple conclusion.
Yes, a Christian university prepares intellectually to engage any number of professions. Yes, university life prepares us to live on our own, to some extent. However, I believe that the bedrock, the mustard seed, the element of Christian higher education that is essential and defining is this: everyday, ordinary, untidy human life. Our spiritual eyes are defective. Harding does its dead level best to restore our eyes, that we may better see God’s nature in the daily grind.
I’ll end with a bit of my own thanks. Thank you, Harding, for teaching me about literature and language and history, that I may better see God daily and clumsily lead my friends to him, as they in turn do for me.
