Helping Students Pay Attention to "New Creation"

Each new academic year, approximately 20 million students will attend college in the United States. The demographics reveal that these students are as diverse as they have ever been. And yet, even though these 20 million students bring with them as many different perspectives, backgrounds, and experiences, they nevertheless all share one thing in common: they all come to college to find their place in this world.

This quest to find one’s place in the world comes in the form of a number of different questions that students ask as they step onto the college campus: Who am I? Why am I here? What is the point of life? Is there a point to life? Do I belong? Where do I belong here? Who are my people? What am I going to do for a living? Who will I marry? (Will I ever marry?) Who will my friends be? (Will I make any friends?). In other words, each year students come on to our campus seeking to discern three inter-related themes: identity, purpose, and belonging.

This is part of what makes the mission of a place like LeTourneau University (LETU) so important for our time. We believe that there are answers to these questions, given to us. We get to intersect with students at this foundational point of their journey as their quest to discover identity, purpose and belonging intensifies. We get to invest in them as they are just beginning to discover their intellectual, social, and spiritual potential.

But it is also what makes working at a university so challenging. What is often frustrating about engaging with college students—and I wish to stress that this is no fault of their own—is that by the time most of them get to us, they have already been conditioned, trained really, to think that what they are studying is fragmented, disconnected, and ultimately unrelated to everyday life: English has nothing to do with math or physics, which has nothing to do with history or biology. And all of these courses have nothing to do with the real world, the lives that you live every day in the dorms and on the field or the court. Their education, they have often been made to believe, has nothing to do with the way they live their social lives in community. In fact, many students have already been formed to assume that the only value of a college degree is that it contributes to them getting a well-paying job.

They also come to us bearing a burden unlike any other generation before them (in spite of the fact that most are not even aware of it): they come to college not only searching for meaning in life (as all generations have), but they come being told (in a number of subtle and not so subtle ways) that they have to manufacture that meaning for themselves. Frankly, this makes the quest nearly impossible for most students, because they have been formed to believe that there is no coherence in our world, that our intellectual, social, and spiritual lives are unrelated and in fact compete against each other. And in lots of ways, big and small, they have learned that we as a society—those who have gone before them on this quest—really don’t know what the point of life is, or what we should be doing with our lives, or why we are doing what we are doing with our lives. And so, in order to survive, they have learned to compartmentalize.

And yet, as challenging as these realities are, this is what makes the mission of LETU so compelling and significant. We have a completely different vision for education here, one that is built on the belief that in Jesus Christ all things are being reconciled (re-integrated), restored, and made new. God is putting the pieces of our Humpty Dumpty lives together again; God is putting things in their rightful order! And not only that; we believe that we have been called to join him in this work! We get to help students make connections and find coherence between academics, their social lives, their athletic competition, and their faith; and in the process we get to also discover how our faith informs and shapes all areas of our lives. But we can only do this together, and we can only do this when we all learn how to pay attention to new creation—to the work of Christ by the Spirit in us, through us, before us, and around us.

“New creation” is the New Testament’s way of speaking about what Jesus has inaugurated with his life, death, resurrection, and ascension. And one of the results, or perhaps better said effects of new creation is our renewed sense of identity, purpose, and belonging. Christ has come to give us belonging, to give us purpose, and give us a new identity. The key word here is gift: we don’t manufacture meaning; we don’t craft our identity; we don’t invent our purpose; we don’t compete for belonging; it’s not our quest! All these things we are looking for—identity, purpose, and belonging—are a gift—given to us by God in Jesus Christ and by the Spirit. This means that our primary task is to receive identity, purpose, and belonging from God’s gracious hand.

And this means that if we are going to enjoy the benefits of new creation, if we are going to be able to receive what Christ has come to bring us, we must be people who can pay attention—to what God is up to in us, through us, before us, and around us. In other words, attentiveness is foundational to our lives; being able to hear and faithfully respond to what God is saying, to what God is doing in us, and through us, and before us, and around us becomes our primary task. What a challenge this is in our age of constant and unrelenting distraction!

In our way of doing life these days we suffer from a kind of collective ADHD which debilitates our ability to do the very thing that brings us quality of life and enables us to join in God’s work of new creation in the world: paying attention—to ourselves, to God, and to what God is doing in, through, around us, and before us. It is one thing to know that we are invited to join God in his work of new creation as he reconciles all things. It is quite another to actually join the party, to develop the craft of attentiveness that enables us to know what he is up to in our midst. (It is the difference between knowing about the physics of making a three-point basket, and actually developing the skills to be able to step up to the three-point line and drain a shot from 20ft 9in.)

If we are going to enjoy God’s work of new creation in our midst, then we have to learn how to pay attention. But how do we do this? Since it is LETU, perhaps a trigonometry analogy might work (which I have stolen and adapted from pastor and theologian, Eugene Peterson).[1]

There are three distinct acts of attentiveness that make up the work of joining in new creation inaugurated in Jesus Christ: prayer, Scripture reading, and spiritual direction:

Prayer: an act in which I bring myself to attention before God.

Scripture engagement: an act of attending to God in his speech and action across time in Israel and Christ.

Spiritual direction: an act of giving attention to what God is doing in the person who happens to be before me at any given moment.

Always it is God to whom we are paying or trying to pay attention. The contexts, however, will vary: in prayer the context is myself; in Scripture it is the community of faith in history; in spiritual direction it is the person before me, or those within my sphere of influence. God is the one to whom we are being primarily attentive in these contexts, but it is never God-in-himself; rather, it is God-in-relationship—with me, with his people, with this person.

Peterson calls this practice of paying attention “working the angles”. Here’s where the trigonometry comes in: in Jesus Christ and by the Spirit, God is breaking into our world to help us understand who we are, why we are here, and to whom we belong. This is part of Christ’s work of new creation. Now let’s imagine that this work of new creation forms a triangle. There is some variability on the triangle: it can be an isosceles, obtuse, right, equilateral or acute triangle. The point is that the visible lines of this triangle are identity, purpose, and belonging. But the angles are prayer, Scripture engagement, and spiritual direction—these three acts of attentiveness. If the angles are out of shape, they will distort the triangle, such that it is no longer a triangle. In other words, if our quest for identity, purpose, and belonging becomes disconnected from the angles of attentiveness, if we lose contact with God through lack of prayer, Scripture engagement and/or spiritual direction, then the triangle gets deformed, becomes something other than a triangle, meaning that our sense of identity, purpose and belonging is no longer given its shape by God. “Working the angles” is what gives shape and integrity to the triangle, to the daily work of receiving what God has given us in new creation. “Working the angles,” that is paying attention to God, is how we come to know our identity, purpose, and place of belonging. It is hard work. It is not work that draws attention to itself. But it is essential if we are going to experience the new life that Jesus has come to give us.

This is the exciting mission that we have been invited to participate in when we became faculty at LETU. Each new semester we get to engage in the following orienting questions:

1. How does life in college distract students from being attentive to the work of God in, through, before, and around them?

2. What are the ways in which the three “lines” of new creation (identity, purpose, belonging) can be done without “working the angles” (i.e., without paying attention to God’s work)?

3. What are some practical ways that faculty can help students be more attentive to the work of God in, through, before, and around them in their college years?

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[1] Peterson, Working the Angles, 3-8.