Heather Holleman,
English,
Penn State University
[March 11, 2012]–
I receive a desperate email from one of my best students. He’s applying to this great new program, but the deadline’s been changed to tomorrow. He has no choice but to beg his professors to write last minute recommendations.
It’s a ridiculous inconvenience. It’s exam week here. I’m grading papers, posting grades, and barely keeping my head above the water. Not only is the recommendation due now, but I have to stop everything, drive across town to my office to pick up the appropriate letterhead, write the narrative, and then arrange to meet the student to drop off the forms.
Precious?
What makes this one student’s life so precious, so important, that I would bother to do what I do not have time for?
I bundle up in my coat and scarf, pull on my gloves and boots, and brave the ice. As I drive, it’s as if God has a message for me about the beauty of the ridiculously inconvenient. God, after all, takes on the inconvenience of flesh, and if I think about it, Christmas and Easter are both actually celebrations of the most radical inconvenience.
A student needing a recommendation seems a small thing, really.
I know, I know. I’ve also memorized the quote: Your lack of planning doesn’t constitute an emergency on my part.
But what if it did? What if I embraced being ridiculously inconvenienced for once in my life and made your particular need my current emergency?
Unusual Satisfaction
I’m smiling as I race into the English department. It is because the student is precious—profoundly so—that I engage in this frenetic activity. And why wouldn’t I go to extraordinary lengths to help him move forward in the direction of his dreams? What makes my time more valuable than his?
Years ago I was that flustered student, trying to meet deadlines, knocking sheepishly on my professors’ doors. How many folks did I inconvenience on my journey? How many emergencies did I bring into the laps of folks I needed to help me?
The life of faith in the academy means I learn to embrace inconvenience. The inconvenient things often usher in the magnificent, the life-changing, and the divine. I felt myself transforming into the type of woman I want to be as I drove back home. I did a ridiculously inconvenient thing for someone, and I knew it was a sacrifice worth making.
What have you done that God used to transform you into the person you want to be?
© 2012 Heather Holleman
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Heather, thanks for sharing. I had a student from the late 90’s to contact me last week, needing a copy of the syllabus from an engineering course he took from me. Being retired, I could have simply excused myself, but I dug into old computer files (14 years back) and found what he needed and e-mailed it to him. In a phone conversation I took the occasion to ask him if he minded my sending him a copy of a Christian article I recently prepared. He graciously consented. Perhaps that was the main reason God had him to contact me. Again, thanks for your article.
Many thanks, Heather. Well written & very inspiring. As a French scholar, I’m especially pleased to get some input from others in the humanities!
blessings,
John Dunaway
Thank you, Heather. This really puts it into perspective! I especially liked “How many folks did I inconvenience on my journey?” That very thought keeps me awake some nights, and motivates a lot of my prayerful confession to God.
Heather – I have loved both of the notes of yours that I have read. You are so inspiring! What you share reminds me of the following brief vignette: A friend of mine is a Braille translator who contracts for school districts. She primarily translates texts in math and science. She recently finished translating nine chapters of a calculus textbook for a high school student in the Midwest. The project took around a year to complete. In addition to hundreds of pages of mathematical prose and countless homework exercises, she had to find a way to represent over 1000 graphics for a student without vision. You can only imagine the number of volumes required to contain this treasure.
Let me phrase this another way. We (our society) values a blind student enough to commission an artist to spend a year of time so that a single young person has the opportunity to try to learn the calculus. What an amazing price for the possibility that one will learn! Using Heather’s words, how inconvenient and yet exactly like our Lord.