Learning from Daniel

"If you can't predict the future - and increasingly you can't - action trumps everything."
--From Just Start, by Leonard Schlesinger, Charles Kiefer, and Paul Brown

This isn't a new idea, but it's an easy value to forget among our organization - both among staff and our students.  It's so easy for us to overanalyze the unimportant particulars, logically give every excuse under the sun, proclaim that we need more training, and assess every possible situation.  It can give us the cover of impressing others by looking super intellectual, smart, logical, and extremely prepared, but the truth is - it's all a facade to hide our deep fears and paralysis around evangelism and all of the unknown the future holds for us.

My colleagues and I have gutted our fall conference in hopes of creating an environment that reverse engineers this over-analytical culture to propel us forward in building God's kingdom and developing followers of Jesus.

That's why the conference has been simply re-named:  act.

act:2015 is InterVarsity's discipleship fall conference for students all across upstate NY.  We gather together for a weekend in Liverpool, NY (basically in Syracuse) to spend quality time with God off of our campus grounds and be challenged to follow Jesus by taking action, not just thinking about taking action.  This year, we focused on the concept of stewardship and studied the book of Daniel to unpack some ways we were called to be stewards of the kingdom of God.

I was asked to teach some of the sessions on Daniel in order to train students to use the inductive study method to study God's Word on their own and within community as well as facilitate discussion around what we find about stewardship in these passages.

I was nervous about teaching the inductive study method in large groups of people, but once we got started and I saw what kinds of observations students were discovering and the connections they were making, it was exciting to see what I learned on my own and what students were learning as well.

Washing students' feet.

John 13:1-6 The Message (MSG)

Washing His Disciples’ Feet

13 ^1-2 Just before the Passover Feast, Jesus knew that the time had come to leave this world to go to the Father. Having loved his dear companions, he continued to love them right to the end. It was suppertime. The Devil by now had Judas, son of Simon the Iscariot, firmly in his grip, all set for the betrayal.

^3-6 Jesus knew that the Father had put him in complete charge of everything, that he came from God and was on his way back to God. So he got up from the supper table, set aside his robe, and put on an apron. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the feet of the disciples, drying them with his apron. When he got to Simon Peter, Peter said, “Master, you wash my feet?”

Earlier this week, I attended our Upstate Team Meetings, a semesterly spiritual formation retreat with the northern half of our NY/NJ region.  During one of the days there, we studied this passage (John 13) together. 

(Yes, it's the Message version.  You're not reading the link wrong.  A rare happenstance in InterVarsity, I know.  Don't worry, we still encountered the Lord.)

One of the big things that stood out to me was the fact that Jesus' identity and authority were not dependent on whether or not the disciples understood what he was saying or doing.  He knew His relationship to God and the authority He had been given to carry out His mission.

This didn't change when Peter clearly didn't understand what Jesus was doing, nor seemed patient enough to wait to understand later.  His identity and authority from God didn't change when Judas betrayed Him.  Jesus continued to love and serve them.  He pressed forward into the tension and confusion.  He didn't compromise his actions.  His authority didn't diminish with the disciples' comments or actions. 

This made me think about two things:

1. While I hunger for a deep sense of joy and compassion for this ministry at RIT, I wonder how much of my lack in those areas is tied to my belief that my authority is determined by how well people understand what I am doing.  It's a belief I know in my head isn't true, but I certainly act on it more than on the truth that my identity and spiritual authority come from Jesus.
   
2. What would it look like to 'wash the feet' of RIT students?  How can I serve them in such a way that would point them to the love of Jesus?

They are still things I am pondering over.  Would you pray with me as I continue to reflect on these thoughts and bring them to Jesus?