I woke up a little later than I was planning and I began to throw some dirty clothes on and began to put in my contacts, when I remembered that I had such an eye problem yesterday. I accidently sprayed hairspray directly into my right eye and I think it completely ruined my right contact. Which sucks because it's my only one and I haven't gone to the eye doctor and gotten new ones in a year and a half. (a pair is only supposed to be worn for a month...) But anyways, the reason I'm telling this story is because it led to a long time-consuming struggle to put that one in this morning and to not have my eye writhing in pain. After that, I rushed to the Dixon Center, eager to hear Shane. I've wanted to hear Shane speak ever since I read Jesus for President this summer. That book really changed the way I look at politics, the government, and Jesus radically. So, you can imagine how much I was anticipating chapel.
As I walked up to the Dixon Center, people were already muttering "it's all full." or "they're turning people away." But I, a very motivated person, shoved past everyone and found they're were no seats and sat down on stairs of the auditorium, along side the risers. Other students began to do the same, and I could see faculty frowning upon it and making kids in the front leave. For some reason they didn't ask us, but I believe they had already evacuated one group of stair-sitters, and that they just didn't feel like moving the second batch. This situation reminded me of a situation in the gospels where the little children came to Jesus for prayer but the disciples rebuked those that brought them and tried to turn them away, but Jesus said "Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these." Today seemed like one of those kind of situations. We,just wanted to come hear Jesus. We wanted to come hear about a Jesus that many of us hadn't experienced. The Jesus that shines through the poor, the hungry, the outcasts. We weren't trusted, just as the children weren't. We were just a nuisance, a potential hazard, but it turned out to be an interesting site to me. The entire auditorium packed; people sitting along the stairs just to hear about the amazing and radical practice of the Gospel. That's a picture we don't often see in our churches. That actually doesn't sound like any service that i've been to lately.
I think the reason that so many people were eager to hear this man speak is because we're curious to hear and see a man who radically lives his christian faith. If we're so interested in seeing such a thing, don't you think that nonbelievers would be also? If not more so? That's the thing that's going to strengthen and grow the church, Christians who live out Christ. They're interesting. They're weird. They make you curious.
I also sat in on a class that Shane spoke in. It was kinda on the "dl" and even though it most of it was something I had already heard him say on youtube, it still ruled and I learned alot.
- As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.
-Martin Luther King
- I don't think it's a sin to be rich, I think it's a sin to die rich."
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