Richard was brave enough to post pictures of himself in a funny hat for *HIS* convocation, so I thought I’d volunteer Jon for some academic robe posing of his own. 😀
The faculty leading the procession to Mees Hall
Jon waving in the procession
Jon receiving his diploma
Jon and his dad Ray
Jon and I. Yes… I am wearing a dress. It does happen on occasion.
Ray, Jon, and I
Thuan (Ed’s wife), Ed, Jon, and me
Rachel, the question-asking kiwi, invited people to ask her questions (within reason) and promised answers. I thought her answer entries were cool, so… I wanted to try it. Leave your questions in the comments section. One caveat: keep them decent because I’m not answering questions about my availability (VERY much taken) or my bra size or anything like that.
In small group tonight, we were talking about prayer and witnessing before diving into the Book of Revelation. One of the contexts given was saying grace in a public place like a restaurant and it reminded me of this…
Since I embraced Christ at age 14, I’ve been fairly intentional about praying before I eat. I was subtle about it at first and got bolder as time went on. By the time I left for college at age 18, I was praying before meals regularly. I wasn’t obnoxious about it — I’d just bow my head for a few moments — but I was very conscious to do so. At first, this really puzzled the motley crew of non-Christian influences with whom I hung out in college and the joke became that I was “waiting for the Lactaid to kick in” if I was eating with Das Group. People knew to just hold off on conversating with me for however long my head was bowed and I didn’t make a huge deal out of it.
I was really focused on being inconspicuous at first because I thought I was shoving my faith in peoples’ faces but everyone was really OK with it and some people actually told me during some of the deeper one-on-one conversations we had that they really thought that it was cool. Others would bow their heads with me if we were all going out to eat and my friend Amy actually asked if we could say grace when we ate together in our apartment during our senior year. Granted, it was a silent prayer but it was a time to give credit to the One who made it possible to have the food on our plates. I’ve gotten lax about my quiet times lately and even praying before I fall asleep (I tend to fall asleep *while* praying a lot of the time) but I’m still very vigilant about saying grace. This puzzles me because I’m doing the little prayers instead of the big ones; but by the same token, I’m also acknowledging my gratefulness to the Lord for what I have and that I would not have it without Him.
Another thing that came of saying grace was that it taught my friends about how much my faith meant in my life. In November 1999, my life was in pieces (literally) and I came into the dining hall one morning in tears. I was eating alone and my friend Amy came and sat down with me and asked me what was wrong, which made me cry harder. She then said the most magical words I’ve ever heard, “Jen, do you want to pray about this?” The reason they were so magical was that Amy was a non-believer (at the time) and it was like “SHE UNDERSTANDS!!!” She offered her hand and I took it and we prayed silently for probably a good 10 minutes. I still get weepy thinking about it because I don’t know if Amy will ever understand how much it meant to me that she sat there and prayed with me. All I know is that she understood that prayer was important in my life at the time and she wanted to help me in a way that was meaningful to me. Other of my friends would ask me to pray with them (also non-believers at the time though some have come to Christ since our graduation) and though I’d be judicious in my wording, it was still an affirmation of my faith and in a way saying that they understood the power prayer could have. Saying grace was a way I could witness to people about my faith and it was an expression of my dependence on God for everything.
I heard a lot about being intentional and praying VERY audibly in restaurants as a way of witnessing. (By “VERY audibly”, I’m talking a voice level 3-4 times above normal.) I think that instead of praying so loudly that others DEFINITELY hear us (cf. Luke 18:9-14), we should pray as we normally do and let people notice us. Believe me… they WILL and I’ve gotten comments on it even when I’ve prayed silently to myself at $tarbuck$ (literally waiting for the Lactaid to kick in). I remember the impact it made on me as a newly-minted Christian to see two people praying over their bear claws at $tarbuck$ and I think that it can have similar impacts on other people.
My $0.02 for what it is worth.
Jon graduated from seminary today. Here are the last few days:
Thursday: I drove Jon down to Columbus to meet my father-in-law at $tarbuck$. He arrives and we go out to dinner while waiting for his bags to arrive from Chicago. We go back to Newark and Jon goes to work on his Approval essays while I do a Wal-Mart run and some light cleaning. We head to church to proofread things for Jon and get home at 11. I do three sinkfuls of dishes and clean the counters. At midmight, I poured straight bleach on the countertops. It made the house smell icky (and yes, I did ventilate the house [though not the kitchen — bad Jen] while doing it) but it got the stains off my counters. I get to bed around 2 a.m.
Friday: Up at 6:45 to get Ray (my father-in-law) and Jon and I out the door to Columbus for Jon’s class picture and meetings. I head to $tarbuck$ for a bagel and a Frappucino. (I needed the caffeine, OK?) Head back to the sem and meet up with a few people. Jon’s advisor takes us out to lunch and then Jon and his advisor meet. We get back to Newark at 3:45 and hurriedly do the last of the cleaning and dinner prep before Bill and Judy arrive at 5 for dinner. (I cooked much of it a few days ahead of time.) Dinner goes well (my first time entertaining, so nerve-wracking for me) and we chill and head back to Wal-mart to get bookcases. In bed at 11 and asleep at 11:45.
Saturday: Up at 6:30 (!!!!) and got Jon, Ray, and I dressed, pressed, and on the road by 8. We get to the sem at 9 and mill around and find seats for the Baccalaureate Eucharist. Eucharist was about the level worship normally is at Jon’s internship site — and this was *celebratory*. There was more prelude music (mostly to give the MACM students a chance to show off) but the worship formality and enthusiasm was about the same, which is a compliment to St. Paul’s because they worship with *GUSTO*. The sermon was hysterically funny — it was Dr. Croy preaching and he has a rather… interesting way of incorporating pop culture stuff into his sermons. His sermon last year on John 14:6 was related to “Wayne’s World” and this one was on the “you are the Son of God” passage in Matthew where Peter gets it and later rebukes Jesus for talking of His impending suffering. (The second the sermon gets posted, I’ll link it on here, OK?) For lunch, we went to the Golden Corral (buffet food — LOTS of it) and made our way to Mees Hall for Commencement. It was an OK ceremony and I got pictures of Jon getting his diploma. We milled around and socialized afterward. We then went to the apartments, got Sable (who was being worked on this weekend by a fellow student who was a Volvo mechanic and fixed her for about 1/3 of what it would have been otherwise), and bade Ray adieu. He had offered to take us to dinner (and I sort of wished we’d just gone for coffee) but we were tired and peopled out, so we returned home.
I was (finally!!!!!) cleaning my study today when I picked up my Bible from Urbana 2000. I noticed that things were stuck in the pages and I pulled them out. The “things” happened to be two funeral cards from two of the people I knew who died during my junior year of high school. One was Mrs. Cooke, my 8th grade English teacher and the other was my friend Gabe Maze. When I’d switched over to my Urbana Bible after coming back, I’d stuck them in certain spots and I guess I forgot to remove them. I thought about them a year ago and wondered where they had gone. Praise God that they are found.
Mrs. Cooke’s card is stuck in Jeremiah 29:11-13 because she had always encouraged us to follow our dreams. The story of the placement of Gabe’s card is this:
The night of his funeral, I was going to put the card in a spot in my Bible. I was in tears and I decided to open it up and see where I wound up. Well… I opened it to John 14:1-4: “Let not your heart be troubled; you believe in God, believe also in Me. In My Father’s house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself; that where I am, there you may be also. And where I go you know, and the way you know” I stuck it there.
Granted, I could have opened my Bible to a passage talking about the flames of hell or something; but I think the Lord knew that I needed comfort at that point and the message was *exactly* what I needed to hear.
For those of you who don’t know, I’m 23 and have yet to get my driver’s license. I passed the Ohio written test with flying colors but I hadn’t gotten the physical part of driving done. I’d been out twice in my parents’ minivan which has the tightest steering column on the planet and freaked out, so my parents have (for the most part) left me alone with only a few occasional snide remarks from my dad. The local driving schools have yet to contact me (and yes, I’ve called them) and I can’t really wait much longer. So… I asked Jon if he could take me to a parking lot to do doughnuts today.
I was doing really well at doughnuts, so we moved on to neighborhood driving. That went well, so I decided to try 30th Street (in Heath). Well… one thing led to another and when I finally stopped the car and got out, I’d moved from 30th Street to State Route 79 to Interstate 70 and driven to Columbus. Jon treated me to dinner in Bexley (Chipotle for me and Grinder’s for him) and I drove back to Newark. 90+ miles on my first day of driving on 5 different types of road and me being really OK doing it. Boo Yah!
(Part of it is that Sable, our ’84 Volvo, handles the road really well and responds to the driver impeccably so all I really had to do was watch the road. I did have a few tight spots such as missing the exit for SR-79 on the way back and having to sneak on, almost hitting someone head on while trying to get in the left lane on Hebron Road, and almost hitting a stop sign while turning on the side street leading to ours, but hey… it was my first day.)
I just watched the Bob Hope special. For those in the Mountain and Pacific time zones, turn on the TV and watch it!!!!! It is so worth watching. He’s the last absolutely funny comedian left and the day he dies will be a national day of mourning. He has done so much more for the morale of US troops than any sitting president and watching his USO footage was the best time I’ve had in ages.