Today my wife and I graduate from Charis Bible College. We’re being awarded degrees and will both be licensed ministers.
For us it’s a little surreal.
Unlikely Students
If you had known us as little as 4 years ago I expect you would have thought that we were an unlikely couple to move across country so we could go to a Bible college. Though I gotta admit, if you’re going to move across country, Colorado Springs is a great place to move to. As my mom said when I first told her we were heading out here, “Well Chris, one thing I’ll say for you โ you always pick nice places to visit to live.”
But we weren’t really the Bible school “type” โ if there is such a thing.
We are just normal folks. I’d switched careers a few years earlier. I left the waterfront behind to start a fledgling web development company. We weren’t those folks who bring every conversation back around to Jesus or anything.
In fact we’d gotten so burned out and hurt by religion that we stopped going to church for the better part of a year before we moved out here.
Wanting More
What we wanted was more. More “what” we’d have been hard pressed to say exactly.
But even though we had a pretty good life, deep down we knew there must be more to life than getting by. We knew the Bible says Jesus promised us an abundant life. Yet we honestly knew our lives were fairly mediocre.
I’ve never been one for going through motions just for the sake of fitting in. If it isn’t real, I don’t want any part of it.
That’s kind of where I saw many of the Christians around me. And that’s how I was. We talked about what a difference Jesus made in our lives. But our lives were barely any different than those around us.
We could see that the transformation Paul talks about in Romans 12:2 hadn’t really taken effect in our lives.
Looking in the Mirror
The Apostle Paul talks about the scripture being a mirror that reveals to us who we really are. Our core problem, as it is with many people, was that we didn’t understand our true identity. We didn’t fully grasp what Jesus accomplished on the cross two thousand years ago.
Now I see that we had a bunch of wrong ideas about who God is and what his character is like. Because we had a wrong image in our minds of the nature of God we were in effect engaged in idolatry, worshipping a god that was far different than the God of scripture.
Spending the last two years in the Bible 4 hours a day, 5 days a week makes a huge difference. Now we’re starting to see God for who He really is.
And in the process we are beginning to understand who we really are, and really own our true identities.
Going Even Deeper
The change in our lives over the last two years of concentrated Bible study is so significant that it’s a bit hard to quantify. Even so, we don’t feel like we’re quite done yet.
So we’re staying on for an optional third year to go even deeper. I tell people we’re not done baking yet. We’re still a little doughy in the middle. ๐
Because we’re staying on for another year of advanced training graduation doesn’t feel as much like a milestone as it may for some folks.
But at the end of the day we know we’ll be helping other folks who want to go deeper with God as well. We don’t know exactly what that will look like. But I expect this site will be part of that moving forward as I share more about my own walk with God.
