holyintention


 

I like to experience life from multiple avenues, so go ahead and listen to this song while you read this post. You may stop reading to groove a bit. No shame. I did it too.

So Wilson Phillips lied to me. Straight up.

Things’ll go your way! The melody was so catchy I almost believed it. You’ve got no one to blame for your unhappiness. Lies. All of them.

I did have someone to blame for my unhappiness, and that someone was staring right at me on the other side of a plexiglass window that I assume was there to keep the unhappy people on one side and the perpetrators on the other.

Welcome to the financial aid window at Jacksonville University. We often call it “crying aid” around campus because it’s well known that many have left that place crying. If you’re looking for a location for your hug ministry, Crying Aid at JU is a great place to start.

I walked into the prestigious looking building and breathed. I decided to put my social anxiety on the back burner (cause college) for five minutes to speak to the financial aid department about my scholarship.

“Hello,” I smiled. “I see that 50 dollars has been taken out of my scholarship fund. I was wondering why that happened?”

“You had too much money.”

“I’m sorry?”

“You had an overage of money, so we took from your scholarship to balance everything out.”

“I don’t understand. Why did y’all do that?”

“It’s just a policy we have in place.”

“Okay. Can you please explain to me why this policy is in place?”

“No.”

“No?”

“No.”

“Seriously?”

I was so confused. I had too much money? If only she knew that I couldn’t purchase my biology book that semester because I had too much money. But the reason why I was so upset had nothing to do with the fact that they took money away from me and everything to do with the fact that they didn’t know why.

Last week I was asked to write a paper about how I make my ethical decisions. It took a professor assigning that paper to me to realize that I have no idea why I make the decisions I make.

Someone once asked me why I don’t cuss. I wish I had a lovely Christian answer for them, but all I could say was “I just never have. At this point it would just sound silly coming out of my mouth.” So why did I make the decision to not cuss? Because it was “just a policy I had in place.” There was really no “why” to it.

And that’s when I knew. I was just like JU Crying Aid. I make decisions and don’t know the why behind it. I have gotten so unintentional about everything I do, think and say that I can’t find my identity, and more importantly, I can’t find Christ’s identity.

A.W. Tozer said in The Pursuit of God that those in the Bible who tried to glorify God in their earthly walk received grace and blessing untold. God “winked at weakness and overlooked failures.” Why? Because God accepted “his intention as fact and acted accordingly. Not perfection, but holy intention made the difference.

February 10, 2015