Fides Quaerens Intellectum

Summer is the time of year that professors, student life administrators, and mentors get Facebook messages and calls from students who have deeply impacted their lives both spiritually and intellectually over the course of the just-finished academic year.  They want to share how life is going in the interim.  It is the same for us at IMPACT 360.  Students come in early September, experience transformational change intellectually and spiritually that most never thought possible, get commissioned in May, and then they’re off and running–equipped and energized to be a force for change on their respective college campuses.  Except…maybe not. Sure, there IS a lasting change in their lives.  But, what surprises some students in the summer months, whether they’re working, taking gen ed courses at home, or whatever, is when they relapse into some of their old tendencies that they thought they had soundly beaten.  The old environment, or one that at least is familiar to it, brings up old stuff.  And this reality isn’t just one unique to college students.  The rest of us, if we’re honest with ourselves, also face this in our journeys.  Lasting transformation requires time in the garden as well as the desert.  But why?

C.S. Lewis put it this way:  “…we must not be surprised if we are in for a rough time.  When a man turns to Christ and seems to be getting on pretty well (in the sense that some of his bad habits are now corrected) he often feels that it would now be natural if things went fairly smoothly.  When troubles come along–illnesses, money troubles, new kinds of temptation–he is disappointed.  These things, he feels, might have been necessary to rouse him and make him repent in his bad old days; but why now?  Because God is forcing him on, or up, to a higher level:  putting him into situations where he will have to be very much braver, or more patient, or more loving, than he ever dreamed of being before.  It seems to us all unnecessary:  but that is because we have not yet had the slightest notion of the tremendous thing He means to make of us.”   -from Mere Christianity