The hand that gives
Happenings of Cambridge
Trimesters in Cambridge are 8–9 weeks. And for those weeks, undergraduates and masters students run hard with demanding work life and eventful social life. As a PhD student, I could remain relatively aloof from the term-time maelstrom of activity, sequestered away in bookish equanimity since my deadlines and assessments are major but much less imminent.
Nonetheless, with great joy, I have thrust myself into the fray. There are so many worthwhile ways to commit myself to people during term time when streets and diaries are full. (For perplexed North Americans, ‘diary’ is British for ‘calendar,’ ‘schedule.’) And actually, I have found that having my pace of life change at intervals, in rhythm with the academic year, helps to sustain stamina for my own three-year writing project.
A new dimension of this term (mid-Jan to mid-Mar) for me is teaching Hebrew. Along with Oxford, the Cambridge educational model is distinctive for its ‘supervision’ system. Here is how it works—if, in fact, it is reducible to explanation: undergrads attend the professor’s lectures for a given class and then meet one- or two-on-one for supervisions with an ‘expert’ in that topic (caveated with scare quotes because PhD students like myself can qualify to supervise!). In their most intimidating form, supervisions would look like a quaking undergrad having their essay ripped to shreds by the professor’s uninhibited criticism, but I hope to offer a much more hospitable presence as I sharpen my students! Typically an undergrad in my department, the Faculty of Divinity, will have about six supervisions per class, concentrated in one or two terms of the academic year. In my enthusiasm for humans and teaching and Hebrew, I agreed to take six biblical Hebrew students (three elementary, three intermediate) with whom I meet individually to discuss their work on language exercises I have assigned and marked in advance. Doing so has certainly thickened up my diary, but how delightful that talking about Hebrew for an hour with a keen bean somehow merits a bit of financial compensation!
Another experience I consider to be ‘very Cambridge,’ probably because of its general resonance with Harry Potter, is attending a formal hall, which I do a couple of times per academic year. I will briefly describe a representative formal for the sheer amusement of those unfamiliar with the practice. Picture this: at 7:00 p.m., people donned in Cambridge academic regalia (just gowns, no funny hats) over dark suits and dresses begin milling around a lobby for ‘pre-drinks.’ By 7:30 p.m., everyone is standing behind their assigned chair at long candle-lit tables in a hall lined with portraits of austere men. A gong is struck. Someone reads a Latin prayer. Then everyone sits, and waitstaff arrive with the first course and its paired wine. Polite conversation ripples throughout this room filled with exceptionally curious students and top-flight academics—an astrophysicist here, a medieval French literary critic there. When the meal concludes (after another gong and Latin prayer 2.0), people drift back over to the lobby for wine and cheese, tea and coffee and biscuits. My perspective on formals? Hilarious in their archaic decorum and happily attended when the College occasionally pays the bill!
To live and study in Cambridge is an absurd privilege that evokes daily gratitude. What I love most, however, is the people with whom I share the living and studying and laughing and eating and caring—even the strangers with whom all I share is a smile on the street. I want my operative question to be not ‘how can I extract all possible advantage from this privilege of being in Cambridge?’ but ‘how is God beckoning me to sow my one little life into other lives, here and everywhere I go, to the praise of his glorious grace?’
As I prayerfully aspire to fruit that lasts, which therefore centres on humans who last, I gravitate towards stewarding my theological training to teach the Bible for confessional Christian communities, to address the questions of those wrestling with biblical faith, and to foster others’ spiritual formation through conversation and prayer. If it ever comes to mind, please pray for my ever-deepening fixity and fervour in the Lord as I increasingly have opportunity to teach, preach, and disciple others, even as each of those verbs continues to be done to me! In case you fancy a listen, here is a sermon that I recently preached for the undergraduate student group at my church on the nature of Christian freedom from John 8:
And more opportunities to teach are on their way! I will be preparing to give a seminar at a church in Scotland on the OT Prophets and to preach to a joint meeting of the Cambridge Inter-Collegiate Christian Union (CICCU) students on the joy of evangelism, both in April. And looking further ahead, hopefully I will be travelling this summer to Cairo, Egypt, to teach at an Anglican seminary. More detail to follow...
Happenings of the heart
Preamble
Being in my mid-twenties and within striking distance of finishing the PhD means, among many things, that I have ample opportunity to consider life trajectory, as ‘what comes next’ swirls together with ‘where,’ ‘when,’ ‘with whom,’ ‘how,’ ‘why’ . . . Hoping to finish the PhD next academic year, I will begin taking concrete steps this coming summer for ‘what comes next.’ I am entering strange territory, approaching for the first time in my adult life a complex crossroads of decision at which an academic program will not conveniently dictate for me the shape of all those variables in one neat package. And the constraining factors look to be few; as of now, I could theoretically go anywhere in the world.
Recently I have been vigorously engaged in the imperative task for the present: that of reflecting prayerfully on how I would decide next steps. What are the principles and priorities at play? What compels me, and what ought to compel me? Where is the boundary between prudence and fear as I register any hesitations in my spirit? My motivations need sifting, and my desires need surrendering before I would dare to venture forward. The dreadful possibility of defaulting to value systems and logics inherited from the world makes me tremble. How I long to walk in the light of God’s wisdom that can look so counterintuitive! How I long to attain his fulness of life by running towards his call to lose my life!
I would guess that few of you are facing an analogous life transition currently, and many probably feel quite settled. Yet it seems to me that this kind of prayerful self-scrutiny is neither temporary nor optional for those wanting to live under the lordship of Jesus. The fact of the matter is that we do not naturally, idly trend towards godliness, like balls roll down hills or helium balloons float upwards. On the contrary, left unchecked, motivations calcify into self-absorption, and desires become enshrined idols. Human hearts are wily, and the enemy of God and his people is wilier still. Thus human hearts require constant, active (re)submitting to the God who gradually remoulds submitted hearts with his kind and capable hands. Facets of my present reflection follow, in hope that you might find it useful as you reflect on and pray about the state of your own heart. And of course, we quickly find that most salient of all is the character of the One who sees our hearts and extends his hand.
Trust and obey
Perhaps you, like me, have sometimes found yourself reading the Bible and wishing that God would deal with us more often in propositions, in abstract absolute statements—cold hard guarantees—rather than in stories. Sure, we know that stories can be gripping and moving, but when we are dealing with cosmic, eternal stakes and intensely personal stakes, an ancient story can almost feel too particular, leaving room for me to be the exception: just because God did that then for them, how can I be assured that he will come through for me now—and every single time, forever and always? If I pause to question the question, however, I realise that I am implicitly communicating that my most pressing concern is for God to disclose (now) and guarantee to me a set of outcomes that I deem agreeable.
May it not be so! Or borrowing Paul’s strong Greek expression, μὴ γένοιτο, ‘by no means’! God has showered his people with promises, all emanating from his chief guarantee of himself, sealed by a covenant vow: ‘I will be your God, and you will be my people.’ If that does not charge our hearts with awe and lay claim to our unmitigated allegiance, it only makes clear just how much rescuing and remaking we do indeed need. And if anyone is liable to unfaithfulness, to renege on the covenant, it is certainly us and not God. His vow has taken him to death and back.
I wonder if God deals fundamentally in stories, in granular particularities—unto the particularity of Incarnation—because his most pressing concern is for us to see who he is as a very real Being with presence among us, who wills and speaks and acts, who relates with real people living in specific times and places. As I watch him in the pages of the Scriptures and then recognise his presence in the unfolding of lives, I come to know and trust who he is as the truth undergirding and overhanging everything he does (those ‘outcomes’ I usually wish to control).
As I learn to trust God in the depths of my being, I also come to distrust my own understanding. I need to learn, over time and through paying attention to pain, to detach my desperate hopes and desultory affections from unfounded fantasies of the good life so that I can cherish God more truly and wholly.
I could drive myself mad—and have, and many do—running around in blind fear and frenzy, driven by self-obsessed raw instinct to pursue or dodge things I assume are worth acquiring or avoiding. But doing so is devastatingly foolish, for the things we most desire cannot be grasped in this way, and the things we can grasp in this way are not ultimately to be desired. And to try anyway is devastatingly lonely, for it amounts to chasing a fantom wind brushing no one’s soul but my own.
Or I could let the wind come first. I could choose to make my soul stand still enough to heed the sometimes gentle, sometimes rushing, wind of the Spirit. And then go with my God where he goes. I am coming to realise that as a follower of Jesus, I am very much constrained, just as tethered at any given point as a follower of Jesus with six kids, a dog, and a tenured professorship. Yes, I am most happily constrained, for I have been given over for unconditional obedience to the One to whom I belong, body and soul.
Admittedly, wondering about the implications of that chosen obedience can send a tremor through me. What am I in for? Have I just signed on the dotted line for hardship? Undoubtedly so, with surpassing glory—oh, that I might inhabit Philippians 3!
I am slowly starting to internalise that the quality of the thing coming from the Lord’s hand at any given time is so secondary as to be beside the point. The book of Job has been insisting upon it for millennia, but the Lord is now commending it to my heart afresh. Whatever I consider good and desirable is only good for me if God has chosen to give it. If he does, I thank him and cradle that precious thing on an open palm. And if he has chosen not to give it—or does and later takes it away—my curious eyes must stay open to watch and pray so that I am ready to perceive his goodness and take the next faithful step. If his hand gives struggle and sorrow, I watch and pray, trusting that the goodness of the hand sanctifies whatever it touches. So even then, even as I am always welcomed to wrestle honestly and strenuously with him in prayer, I can say, only by his help, that I would not have it any other way. The hand that gives, takes away, and withholds is the same scarred hand that has plunged into the pit to draw me out, setting my feet on the rock and a new song in my mouth. So for a lifetime, for all eternity, I will keep singing my way deeper into the mystery that this scarred hand is fundamentally one that gives, and gives, and gives, and never stops giving.