'Tis Better to Love the People

I am today overwhelmed by realizing how privileged Jeff and I are.  He just called from school, elated because he passed his Greek exam, but even more elated by the Seminary Chapel he attended this morning.  As commuter students, we’ve rarely had the opportunity to attend Seminary Chapel on Tuesday mornings, but now Jeff has made a commitment to attend this term.  They someone dwindled in recent years, but apparently there is a new resurgence of God’s Spirit taking place.  For the five or six chapels of the semester, each one will embrace and a different worship style, expressing the variety of ways that God’s people can worship Him through song, scripture, and response. This mornings was a more liturgical style, which some students have likely not been exposed to.  They sand responsively and read scripture responsively, and were blessed by how God’s Spirit moved over them, even while in this more “constrained” style of worship.  Jeff loves the idea of demonstrating different styles–helping students realize that there isn’t “one right way” to hold a worship service.

FOr the message, each chapel will have a different professor share.  The topics? They are asked to share what is their one message, if this was the last thing they were ever able to share with students before they die, what would it be.  Wow. Powerful.  These are men and women of God who have loved and labored with Christ for 20, 30, 40, 50+ years (Dr. Reeve is 92 and just retired after teaching at Multnomah for more than 40 years.  She has served Christ as a single woman her entire life.)  These men and women have wells of knowledge, wisdom, and grace to impart to us as students.  And the amazing thing is that they don’t just love to teach, they love us.

So today Dr. Blom shared a story, which I’d heard before.  He explained that is was through his mentors that he learned the most about loving Christ.  When he was a young pastor, he’d finished preaching a message and many people around him were telling him how good the message was, etc.  He was beaming, of course, and exclaimed, “I love preaching!”  His mentor responded, “‘Tis good to love to preach. ‘Tis better to love the people.”  Dr. Blom hadn’t done anything wrong, but this was a powerful reminder that we can fall in love with what we do more than who we serve.  “Tis good that I love to write.  “Tis better that I love the people I write for.  ‘Tis good that I love to speak at retreats.  ‘Tis better I love the people at the retreats.  ‘Tis good to love to minister and serve and do good deeds.  ‘Tis better to love the people, all of them: nice, grumpy, young, old, sweet, smelly.  ‘Tis better to love the people

Jeff and I are so privilege to be at a school where professors truly do love the people.  My mentor, the professor I mentioned earlier in “Being Believed In” amazes me about how she always makes the aim of our time to serve me.  I am her intern, which means that I will do anything she asks me to do, but she continually returns to what would be best for me, as her follower.  She loves what she does as teacher, scholar, researcher, but most of all she pours her life out for me, the person.  I’m so thankful for the men and women at Multnomah.  Jeff and I are privileged indeed.

So my prayer is that whatever we love to do, that most of all we would love the people.  ‘Tis good to love to _____, ‘Tis better to love the people.