Mark Pritchard
Business, Central Washington University
Emergency college meetings are rarely good.
The day started well enough. It was Good Friday, and I had invited the head of our journalism school to attend a sunrise service with me.
Lowell Paxson, founder of Pax TV, spoke of coming to faith, and how Christ’s resurrection gives hope for eternal life.
P & T Rejections
His message stood in stark contrast to the meeting for junior faculty and department heads that I was to attend later that morning when I was still at Arizona State. Our new president had just rejected virtually all of the promotion and tenure files our college had forwarded for approval.
The mood was tense as we began our meeting. Then the music started. Our room jutted out onto a lawn in the center of the ASU campus, where a student-led Good Friday service was getting underway.
Several colleagues reacted immediately. “Oh no! They always make such a racket,” was the lament. “Quick, shut the windows and draw the blinds.” As some covered their ears inside, a senior athletics administrator stood out on the lawn and spoke to students about her coming to know Christ several years earlier.
Has the Lord ever illumined an event for you? As the meeting progressed, the whole picture began to sink in.
I had read a book some years before by John Wimber where he described God’s grace as a honeycomb, filled with honey, dripping out on the people below. Some danced and rejoiced at the honey’s sweetness, while others wanted none of it and looked to wipe off the sticky stuff. The responses he described were similar to those that Paul encountered in the meeting of the Areopagus in Athens (Acts 17: 22-32). Some were thankful to hear about Christ, some undecided, others irritated.
What Could Make A Difference?
I am sure Paul took no umbrage. God’s heart remains constant despite our defiance (Romans 5:8). As a late convert I knew this firsthand, yet I left the meeting troubled with an undiluted image of what the Gospel was up against. “How can any be saved?” I asked (Matt 19:25).
Then in true academic fashion I inquired, “Lord, what report could I bring that might make a difference?”
His answer, still and small, was only one word: “Love.”
“For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish, but have eternal life.”
© 2006 Mark Pritchard