Rachel E. was baptized on Sunday, June 13.  She’ll be graduating from college next month, getting married to Karl, then heading off to work in the inner city New Orleans with her husband as public school teachers.

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They say when you come to college, the first year you are still thinking from inside the walls of your parent’s house. It is a slow, painful process, but gradually your professors and friends aid in the disassembly of that house until all the two by fours are in a pile where you can take each one and thoroughly examine it. This could go on for years, or never. Eventually, it is expected that you would rebuild a home for yourself, carefully choosing which board you will use again and which ones to leave in scrap.  

My faith in God is nothing of my own doing. I am probably the chief saboteur of my own relationship with the Lord Christ. Rather than upholding pillars of a cathedral around my heart, which is St. Teresa of Avila’s beautiful analogy of our soulish vessel for the Holy Spirit, I’d say most days I struggle to keep a cardboard cover. I get blown around a lot, by the elements, by other people’s opinions of me and of the universe, by the un-ignorable state of injustice that is worse than a multi-drug resistant infection.  

I came to know Christ through a few individuals who took notice of my awkward struggle to construct an identity all my own. They say true friends are the people to whom you can say the things you’d rather not have to say, and they are those who tell you things you’d rather not have to hear. I’ve been unexpectedly blessed by angels who came out of the woodwork to walk with me through some dark times, and those conversations tell the true story of my faith. But like John said, “if every one were written down, the whole world would not have the room for the books that would be written.” 

My own stubbornness and arrogance are to blame for those dark nights of the soul. Loneliness is a bitch. By my sophomore year at SPU, I had pretty much encapsulated myself into a cocoon of pain—not of growth—more like an isolated tomb that still managed to smile away others’ concern. A dear professor of mine saw through the veneer, and pulled me aside more than once to minister to my hurting. He shared that on the day of his own conversion, a professor told him, “I am glad you are feeling this pain. You need to feel it some more.”  So I did, and it was a refining fire kind of good in my life. I am a scientist, I am a philosopher, I am a comic, a cynic, I am a leader, a face on campus, and a very ugly sinner. These identities have made it very hard to accept the message of the cross, to truly believe that on top of all that schlock, I am also beloved, forgiven, and worth the sacrifice of death to be fully reconciled. I will profess as a living paradox who is tormented by the mystery of God’s salvation that only Jesus is freedom.   

Paradigm shifts have a way of sneaking up on you. At the end of this year, I will no longer be a student but a teacher, no longer a fickle date but a wife, and I’ll be eating Bayou crawfish and beignets instead of salmon and bagels. Today I want to profess that I will substitute nothing for my faith. There will be no paradigm shift in my soul. This is not to say that all of a sudden the dark glass that I squint through has come clear, that the cosmos makes one iota of sense, or even that I feel particularly uppity today. At the end of this year, I will still doubt Christ, I will still limp on my own understanding, I will probably still have a hard time praying in public and curbing my anger at all of the world’s and my own failures. It’s a daily process, an evolution that tinkers along with each new friend, with the reports of the New York Times, with the uncanny ways Jesus chooses to reveal himself unto me through Scripture and in lab notebooks. But today, I will have obeyed. And tomorrow I will keep trying. I thank all of you here for holding me up along this way, please continue, and I would be blessed to do the same for you.