Monday, November 16, 2009

How great is our God

God is great.

How often I've said these words, often with a tinge of a spiritual high, a hint of thrill traveling down my spine. Hands in the air, face upturned, the full worship band harmonizing. Yet, do I really worship and give honor to the God who is the LORD of the universe? Do I truly see Him for the awesomeness that He embodies, the complete divinity of His being?

No.

No.

No.

I don't.

I don't see Him beyond my selfish view of my perceived future. I don't see Him beyond the jealousy at others. I don't see Him past the blinds of the next week, the next test, the next meeting.
I don't see Him as the awesome Creator-I don't see Him as GOD. To ponder-what is God? Have I allowed my view of God to a tiny, contained speck of His true glory?
I remember climbing a waterfall with Kenneth, Karen, and Sarah in Peru, and as we were shimmying up the rope (with no safeties) I marveled at the raw beauty and awesomeness of what we beheld. I remember climbing to the top of Waynapicchu and being arrested by the sea of mist and mountains as far as the eye could see. I remember the perfection of green and blue on the hill as we descended the valley to the thermal baths. I remember them not only because of the fuzzy feelings and warm memories; I remember them because they struck me with the awesomeness of God as Creator. On our climb up the waterfall, I remarked to Sarah, "How can people see things like this and NOT praise God? How can they say, 'what an interesting result of millennia of evolution'?"
And now, I have gradually been making God into this personal genie holding the keys to my future medical school. I've been praying, meditating, and listening-but with my eyes and ears trained on a singular goal, a wretched prize. With this, I have focused my eyes on a profession too often filled with oversized egos and overweening pride. How often have I heard the none-too-subtle arrogance with every interview from a prestigious school; how often have the polite questions about acceptances demanded answers with devouring eyes and wry smile.
Too often we try to hide our insecurities, or boast in the most surreptitious way.

In the process, I have forgotten the greatness of God.

By coming before Him with my heart set on this worthless goal, I have negated the fact that I live for God-not that God exists for me!

I was created for this awesome, mindblowing, eternal presence. I was created so that at His approach I would be like Job.

Job 42:3-6

Surely I spoke of things I did not understand,
things too wonderful for me to know.

4 "You said, 'Listen now, and I will speak;
I will question you,
and you shall answer me.'

5 My ears had heard of you
but now my eyes have seen you.

6 Therefore I despise myself
and repent in dust and ashes."

I repent. I come before God again, broken, a man who lives not for his own glory, but for the glory of the one true God.

Monday, November 9, 2009

glory and joy

1 Thessalonians 1:19 For what is our hope, our joy, or the crown in which we will glory in the presence of our Lord Jesus when he comes? Is it not you?
20 Indeed you are our glory and joy.

What touches my heart is the sweet, intimate fellowship with my brothers and sisters here. now.
How beautiful it is! How wonderfully marvelous! The wholeness, the culmination of my lunches, dinners, outdoor talks at the Broch, powerful and intimate cell groups, post-cell group silliness and hilarity, devastating-yet-encouraging prayer, dear, dear disciples...

You are my glory and joy.

Thursday, October 8, 2009

my cup overflows

Psalm 23
A psalm of David.
The LORD is my Shepherd, I shall not be in want.
He makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside quiet waters,
He restores my soul.

How beautiful is God's word, how wondrously marvelous His provision! When I read this, for some reason it speaks straight to my soul. The LORD is my Shepherd...who else protects me from the voracious wolves that seek to devour me alive? Who else snatches me, torn and bleeding, from the maws of the lion? Who slays my greatest enemies-anxiety and pride-only to bring me to a place of ultimate peace and comfort? the LORD. I shall not (NEVER) be in want.
He restores my soul. He restores me. OH GOD! How beautiful is this image! I have thirsted and feel as if I were dry up to this point, broken and nonfunctional until tonight, when the Spirit of God entered me and showed me where my security was. As a freshman, I remember sharing in my small group that the only concept I have ever held firmly is: God is sovereign. I distinctly recall the surprise that passed over Josh's face. And then I (being the self-conscious freshman) immediately thought-did I say something wrong? Uh oh...
Yet these past three years have given me a new appreciation for that statement. God's sovereignty. When I was but an impressionable young soul, God had already blessed me with this immense and ponderous, sweet and glorious truth about Himself.
He guides me in paths of righteousness for His name's sake.
Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil,
for You are with me; Your rod and your staff,
they comfort me.

Recently God's been distant from me-ever since coming back from Peru, I have felt a distinct emptiness. Part of that's due to sin, part of that is due to pride, part of that is from disappointment. Whatever it was (and is), I have been begging and pleading with God to end this dry spell, this lack of soul restoration that has kept me in a constant state of stress. Even in that valley, that pit whose sides were deeply etched with desperation and longing, God was with me. He comforted me so that I would not falter in my ministry, He was the reason I could still show others His power. Yet inside I felt this crushing burden, this distance from God. It's a funny feeling-you KNOW that God is here, but you don't really know it. My mind and soul know that he's there, but my agonizing body does not. I desire Him more than anything else, my soul cries out for comfort-yet when I finish my prayers or devotional time I fall back into my own problems.
You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies. You anoint my head with oil;
My cup overflows.
My enemies, though they taunt and torment me, finally are vanquished. utterly. God Himself prepares the victory feast in front of their leery eyes. He honors me in their presence, He shows His sovereignty in the most powerful way.
My cup overflows.
I felt that tonight. I felt God finally preparing that table before me, anointing me,
and my cup-my life, my spirit, my soul-all overflow with the peace and love of God.
Surely goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life,
and I will dwell in the house of the LORD
forever.

Wednesday, July 8, 2009

Post #2

I got a bit disgusted with blogging after recounting everything I´ve been ¨doing.¨ So instead of having a list of activities and experiences, I´ve vowed to stick to what´s meaningful to me.
So, four and a half weeks have passed since I´ve come to Perú. What used to be exciting and new has now dulled into a routine...but this new sense of normalcy comes with its own jilts of heartwrenching separations and heartwarming rewards. The clinic where I work in, el Centro de Salud en Independencia, has become a home for me. From the nurses Isabela, Rhut, and Miriam to the doctors Darwin, Luis, and...I forget her name...I´ve really been able to immerse myself in their world and become (basically) a staff member at the clinic. I´m now quite used to babies and toddlers, and (unfortunately) well-acquainted with the arcane and confusing system of medical records that the nurses have to maintain to report to the ministry of health. These are basically notebooks, regular notebooks, with about twenty columns that have to be drawn EVERY SINGLE TIME A PAGE IS TURNED. So many columns that it´s so, so easy to make a mistake and subsequently 1) lose data and 2) confuse all the rest of the columns because you´re lacking one or have an extra. However, my frustration has borne fruit-my mini-project is to create a database program to ENSURE that NO information is lost between the lines. I´ve really seen God´s hand in this, because one week ago my usual Spanish tutor Reiner (who is amazing and a huge comfort because we talk openly about spiritual things and he shares so much with me) had to go to Urubamba on urgent personal business, and I was switched to a Cuban named Alexis. While we were talking during the third lesson, I discovered that he was a specialist in Sistemas Informáticas!!!! Basically, he does databases for a living. So, we´ve been working together and I really, really hope that we can get something awesome out ASAP.
One thing I´ve learned though is that everything, really everything, is based on relationships. If I am faithful in seeing him as a person, in appreciating him as God´s child, in loving him as a follower of Christ-it automatically builds a very strong relationship simply because, in human terms, I am a very good friend. However, if I cultivate a relationship with the aim of using him as a tool and a means to an end, my deception will be shown for what it is, and I will completely alienate him.
Come to think of it, relationships are what have caused some of the heartwrenching moments on this trip. First, I praise God for the beauty and strength of Christian fellowship while here in Perú. From the very beginning, God encouraged me by having a first contact with John Marshall, who was my original roommate and a strong follower of Christ (it made us both happy when we were friends on Facebook to see ¨God¨ as the foremost of our interests). Then, I met Trey and Tram, two really awesome guys (incidentally also from Georgia) who were in the clinical internships and loved listening to sermons. Which we then did together with John at their house on Sunday evening. THEN, I meet Reiner, my Spanish tutor, who happens to have an amazing testimony about how Christ saved him from alcoholism and despair at the age of eighteen, and who is passionate about serving Him here in Perú. The blessings of God are even greater than I could ever have expected-I met Sarah, a married ex-teacher who has an amazing dream of opening import stores tied to refugee camps, where they could be taught to make crafts that could be sold to provide them the necessities and income that they desperately need who, incidentally, loves Jesus Christ and house churches. Kenneth and Karen, two Singaporeans government-bonded studying at Princeton, who love God as well and were invaluable supports to me (almost like my brother and sister here in Perú). I was able to go on wonderful excursions with Karen, Kenneth, and Sarah to Quillabamba-Santa Teresa-Aguas Termales and Machu Picchu-Aguas Calientes-Putu Cusi (latter minus Sarah). When Trey and Tram first left, that was the first jolt that made me realize-this sense of normalcy is quickly ending. When Kenneth and Karen left, THAT made me reflect the rest of the day on how much I had grown to care for them and draw support from their friendships. Now, as I look forward to the one and a half weeks left, I find myself withdrawing from Matt, my host brother, because I fear the imminent separation and do not want a more painful severance. It sounds cheesy, but I know that for me there is no greater hurt than parting from people that you´ve grown to love. Yet, at the same time, I am continually convicted of my need to love God first before loving people. Matthew 21:37-40
Jesus replied, ¨Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it, ´Love your neighbor as yourself.´All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.
I have committed the grievous error of loving people, my neighbors, more than the Lord my God-that´s the root of my destructive reaction of drawing away from people. If I loved God, then I would be satisfied and always have love to spare for others. However, my love for others and the consequences of focusing on that love amplifies the hurt of separation so much that I go the opposite direction: instead of cherishing the relationships I have now, I reject contact and distance myself. Sometimes, I become a syncophant, an echo of compliments and empty words; other times, I am proud, aloof, waiting for others to come to me. In any case, I am an empty shell, devoid of meaning and love because I lack a passion and love for God.

Sunday, June 14, 2009

First post from Perú

Since I´m at an internet café and have to pay by the hour, and will be going to fellowship with some Christian friends in a few minutes, it´ll be a very brief update. I´ll wax poetic some other time.
The weather here is crazy. Hot, blazing sun during the day and bone-crackling cold during the night. They weren´t kidding about the layers, and neither were they about the need for long underwear in addition to the five layers of blankets.
This first week has been completely mindblowing. I have been adopted into a family, with a dad who´s a chef and restauranteur, a mother who´s incredibly humorous and caring, and a sister who likes to go to bars and discotecas. I have a brother who´s from Princeton, a rising junior studying economics and finance doing an amazing internship with microfinance institutions in rural Perú. I have learned so much about Peruvian cuisine, and can now claim to make a simply delicious Pisco sour.
Proworld has a very good support system, with several on-site staff members and a very good partnership with many locals in the area. I have met students from New Jersey to Georgia, and have thoroughly enjoyed getting to know them. I started clinic last Friday, and Peruvian doctors are simply amazing. They diagnose and prescribe in a matter of minutes, and have no qualms about asking anything and everything to give a diagnosis. Mixing humor with piercing questions, they are definitely future colleagues whose perception is to be respected.
So on to activities. I´ve played tourist around Cusco, which is a rather charming city that was the center of the Incan empire. Although many of the temples and holy places have been razed or replaced by Catholic churches, it still retains its shape as the head of a cougar, which represents the present world for Incans (condor represents the realm of the gods, and snake the life after death). The alleys are quite narrow, and at night the city is really beautiful. The hillsides are like a spray of twinkling stars, and there´s a white statue of Jesus Christ at the top of a mountain that at night looks like a floating cross. The square is beautiful, as the lesser light of the lamps magnify the architecture and grandeur of the cathedral and Jesuit church, and there are people everywhere on the streets. One thing that I´ve noticed about Cusco is that there are quite a few young lovers who are a) furtively meeting in corners in residential areas, b) quite public with their affection, or c) at different points of downtown seemingly attached to one another (amantes pegados). This experience of urban life has really given me a feel of humanity, all the vices, emotions, and realities that humans have. I have been to my first bar, my first discoteca, and learned salsa dancing. I promised my parents that my first drink will be with them on the 25th of July, my 21st birthday, so I have not touched alcohol in large quantities. The only tastes I have had is my dad´s pisco sour (he urged me to try a little so that I know what a correct one tastes like) and a tiny sip of cuscena beer (which was bitter and blegh). I´m actually quite glad I made this promise, because drinks are pretty pricey, and not worth it when you can have freshly squeezed juice for a fraction of the cost and you thoroughly enjoy everything without having to be drunk.
I´ve also toured the Incan ruin of Saqsayhuayman, the fortress of the Incans that forms the head of the cougar. It was where the Incans fled after the Spanish laid waste to Cusco, and there are enormous stones that archaeologists are still trying to understand how Incans managed to haul up the mountain. One thing that especially struck me was the massive size of the cornerstones, and gave me a new appreciation for the importance of the cornerstone for any structure!
I´ve been shopping with my dad, and have gotten some pretty good deals on really authentic stuff. I´m really glad to have a host family, which has given me a security that allows me to not be so afraid of the city and this new environment.
One final Peruvian phrase: lo bailado y lo comido nadie le va a quitar
what´s danced and eaten nobody will be able to take away.

Monday, May 4, 2009

home

Home.
Refuge for my weary soul. Or is it a trap?
I spent today milling about, waking up at ~11 AM to my cellphone going off. Then, devotions (yay!) brunch (scrambled omelette w/o cheese + freshly brewed soymilk)...and then the one thing that I swore I would not do: TV. From there, it was a slippery slope to obsessively reading manga online...and then basically staying in the house, wasting several hours of my young adult life.
It wasn't until after dinner that I got to doing one of my goals for the summer: serious reading for 1 hour+ to edify my mind and soul.
And then, I realized-
A day had passed.
I could count the number of things I did on ONE hand.
I had minimal human contact.
Worse yet, I had minimal God contact.
This reality shocked me out of the summer reverie, the brief honeymoon of going back to my home church and seeing all the parents (not children, mind you) with smiles and updates on what God has been doing in my life-along with advice on colleges.
These next few months will be a test, and perhaps the most grueling one of all: how to maintain spiritual growth and intimacy when I am wrenched away from my beloved fellowship in Houston.
Although I always considered DCFC my church home, it's often been a spiritual wasteland in terms of fellowship for young adults. HCC was not necessarily where I felt most comfortable, but the intimate and life-giving fellowship at Rice has provided me a testament to God's provision in my life. Now that I'm back for four months, it's time to see where God wants me in His kingdom here. I no longer have the excuses to hide from fellowship (aka MCAT), and neither do I have a mandate to start another fellowship here in Dallas (I'll be gone for 6 weeks in the middle). I just know that God wants me here for a reason. He wants me to plug into DCFC and use His blessings for everlasting glory. But how?!
God is faithful, but I am not always so. Yet even when I am faithless, God will continue to be faithful, for He cannot disown Himself. (2 Timothy 2:13)
Today God revealed to me the importance of clinging to Him...and revitalized the desire for me to test my intellectual boundaries in this faith! While reading a chapter from Beyond Opinion, a collection of essays compiled by Ravi Zacharias, I read this sentence that struck me in the stomach: "My prayer for weekly youth group gatherings is that they will go from being an entertainment show full of feel-good games to an intense forum that invites tough questions and provides satisfying answers." Wow. How is it that I have (personally) started to deviate from the mind and into emotion alone? How is it that relationships are taking undue precedence over the testing of our faith?
I know I'm in dangerous territory, because a corollary to the "intense forum" is that we must LIVE out these "intense" truths WITH LOVE so that God is glorified, not ourselves.
But I still ask of myself: do I go to the opposite extreme? Have I preached love to the extent that I have deviated into the realm of pleasing people and have not engaged in the hard-hitting evangelism that demands asking and answering these tough questions?
I think so.
Then God reminded me of what I had read in His word during the morning: 2 Peter 1:16-21
16We did not follow cleverly invented stories when we told you about the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty. 17For he received honor and glory from God the Father when the voice came to him from the Majestic Glory, saying, "This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased." 18We ourselves heard this voice that came from heaven when we were with him on the sacred mountain.

19And we have the word of the prophets made more certain, and you will do well to pay attention to it, as to a light shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts. 20Above all, you must understand that no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet's own interpretation. 21For prophecy never had its origin in the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.

Peter fights against the perception of "cleverly invented stories" by saying that he was an EYEWITNESS to the majesty of God! Furthermore, it is on the WORD of the prophets (aka Scripture) that provides the ultimate basis for Jesus Christ.
This sharp, pointed argument for the legitimacy of the Bible was what Peter and the first-century Christians had to engage in to both deflect criticism and engage the lost in dialogue about the one true Christ! What good are we if we affirm the love of Christ among ourselves, yet fall flat at any challenge and fidget uncomfortably when hard questions are asked?
Rather, let me strive (however hard it is) to test my mind on these questions with a heart that prays for guidance and a spirit obedient to God Almighty.

James 1:6 6But when he asks, he must believe and not doubt, because he who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind.

Sunday, April 5, 2009

I've just been thinking. And trying to understand what's going on inside this soul of mine.
First...I felt this unease. This sense of what-is-going-on-here after we finished that rather bloated cell group meeting on Friday. Why do I have this melancholy feeling, this slightly nostalgic-but-not-really sense that creeps up on my heart? I know. It's the after-effects of meiosis. I found myself saying "splitting," and then Jon told me-that sounds rather painful, like a divide rather than a joyous "multiplication." In a sense, that's really how I feel. I have poured my life into these wonderful, amazing people who have in turn shown me what happiness, struggle, and growth are in Christ Jesus. Truly, by seeing these freshmen and sophomores grow I have been tremendously blessed, because as Paul boasted about the love of Christ in the churches, I boast about the love of Christ in our cell group. Yes, OUR cell group. And now, it's going to change. All of the ones who have endeared themselves to my heart are going off into another direction, ready to conquer Rice for Christ. They are smaller, but nonetheless passionate and loving and, best and most important of all, following Christ! When Dillon and I sat down late Friday night, my heart actually trembled a bit before opening up the nicely stacked and folded sheets. Instead of opening them all myself, I had to give half to Dillon for him to open because I could not bear the burden of seeing all the choices first. Yet, before we even started-our prayers to God were that His direction and will would be done, and not ours. This has truly been an agonizing process for me before last Friday, because-truthfully-I didn't want to divide. In my heart of hearts, I saw us as one big, boisterous family who loved one another and truly cared for each other. I envisioned my own extended family all gathered in a room every week, sharing encouragements and just hanging out, with the underlying feeling that we are all connected, all related by the same blood. Our cell group was something akin to that-we all love Christ, and from that love we are so comfortable loving on one another.
God answered our prayers. With each opened ballot, I could see God automatically placing people where He wants them. He is so awesome-as the groups took form, I could see how God was using different people to strengthen and support one another in each group. I cannot express how much I was relieved that night...but then, I can now say that I will miss that big-family feel.
I am grateful to everyone in this group, people who have touched my life so profoundly and have challenged me to stand and be an example of Christ in their lives. All because I was a shepherd did not mean that I was immune to temptation and sin. However, through God's grace and the knowledge that I must be solid in my walk with Christ to be a leader, I depended all the more on my heavenly Father to give me wisdom and strength, to be my guide and King. I love these people more than anyone else...and while we look forward confidently to what God is bringing, I also will cherish these memories and relationships that God has so lavished upon me.

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Hello, "no". Or, a nicely packaged and primly placed "we received a number of strong applications, but..."
Rejection is quite disconcerting. Especially when you think that you don't deserve it. While I can fume and fret and just agonize over a rejection, I think it's actually the most meaningful answer to receive. I haven't received many negatives in my time in college, and the memory of dreaming-thinking-trembling-ohmygosh-GAH! has left. Instead, I have the solid backing of success in my time here, where every door was opened, every program successful, and every endeavor fruitful.
But the biggest lesson here is: I forgot who gave this to me. I forgot that it was God who made this stubborn, prideful, self-conscious heart. I forgot that He gave these to me freely, and was present every step of the way. I have become so mired in my success that I cannot hear the voice of God anymore. Rather, I have become a despicably "entitled" persona-one who feels as if everything should come because of past successes.
It is not past success, but present passion and future greatness that are most important. I guess that's what "sitting on your laurels" really means. If I were a Nobel laureate and already had all the funding I needed just by signing a grant proposal, would I endlessly receive huge sums? Well, yes and no. I would at first because of the prodigious honor, but if I did not continuously hone my passion and mind so that I "graduated" from the past, eventually the money would stop rolling in. If I do not put my successes in the past now, there will be nothing for me in the future.
All this, and God is omnipresent. He is here, in my life-whether I honor Him, reject Him, or dishonor Him. In Sunday School, one of the young adults had quite the epiphany-that God's constancy is so amazing simply because He will never negate Himself, while fickle humanity vacillates from one end to the other. I have forgotten that this cell group is not my own, nor is it my creation-it is God's! These people do not follow me, as if I were some great teacher-but Christ living in me. They do not need me to take care of them; God is sovereign and omnipotent, and will work in their lives with or without my presence!
Similarly, the volunteer world (in the most formal sense) at Rice University is fine without me-in some ways, I am merely a hindrance. If I were awarded a spot on the Rice Service Council, I think I would impede progress-simply because my heart motives were not right in the first place.

Come to think of it, God has really revealed the paramount importance of heart motive in anything that I do. Whenever it has been flawed or tainted, God has forced me to relinquish it, or has pried it from my hands. Whether it be courses that I take "just to get a good grade," positions or internships that I apply to "because I think I can/deserve to get it," professors whose recommendations I court "because they've written good ones in the past,' or even projects done simply because I "think I could do it well." The common thread: my motives were based on a sense of self-entitlement, self-power, and self-direction. And yet, so many people around me do the same things, and come out in spades. Why is the opposite true for me?
I know that it is because I know God, I love Him, and I am His servant. For me to serve Him well, I need to be pure in heart, and second in my life. My life is no longer mine; today I was reading this awesome passage in Philippians 2
Therefore if you have any encouragement from being united with Christ, if any comfort from his love, if any common sharing in the Spirit, if any tenderness and compassion, then make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and of one mind. Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of others. In your relationships with one another, have the same attitude of mind Christ Jesus had:
Who, being in the very nature God,
did not consider equality with God
something to be used to his own advantage;
rather, he made himself nothing
by taking the very nature of a servant,
being made in human likeness.
And being found in appearance as a human being,
he humbled himself
by becoming obedient to death--
even death on a cross!
Therefore God exalted him to the highest place
and gave him the name that is above every name,
that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.

Christ Himself humbled Himself for the glory of God the Father. Yet, that allowed Him to be exalted and glorified above all else! I have been seeking glory for myself too much this year-it is time to look away from me and to others. God pierces my heart with His sword-may I be obedient to His calling.

Sunday, March 8, 2009

I love Britishers. or, non-specific Englishmen.

From the BBC:

The mechanics of tipping US-style


By: Kevin Connolly, BBC Correspondent

Paying something extra to the person who has provided you with a service is common in the US, but working out who gets a tip and how much can be confusing, as Kevin Connolly reveals.

Hi. My name is Kevin and I am going to be your reporter today.

I will be offering you a very long extended metaphor. How would you like that - well done, or really, really overdone?

While you are choosing, maybe I could bring you some adjectives - rhadamanthine, mellifluous, torpid, porcine. We have got them all.

And if, when our business is done and I have brought you a couple of adverbs speedily and obligingly, you feel moved to leave me some small financial consideration then we will both be richer.

I will actually be richer, and you will have been given, well, the opportunity to give.

Now, I know you have already paid me to write this, but this is not about the overall deal. It is about you and me and the relationship we have been building up over the last 45 seconds.

Do you not remember those adjectives?

Superior service

The world really starts to look like a different place when you spend a few months exposed to the world of American service with the laser-beam intensity of its hurried charm.

Americans think it is the most natural thing in the world to pay for a service, at the point where you receive it, person-to-person.

First, they reason, it keeps whoever is doing the serving on their toes.

Your French Toast will be Frencher, your upside-down cake more comprehensively inverted when someone knows their income depends on it.

There is something in that, by the way. I have waited half an hour for a receipt in communist Poland while watching two young waiters playing football with a polystyrene cup.

And it is widely recognised that most people working in the service industries in America are underpaid by their employer on the assumption that you will be taking up the slack when it comes to tip time.

Whenever I object that this system means that almost every transaction you undertake in America is booby-trapped with social awkwardness, I am shouted down.

'Kind of journey'

Everyone knows, I am assured, the scale of charges.

A dollar for a doorman, $2 (£1.40) for a shoe-shine or a taxi-driver, double the sales tax for a server in a cafe, $1 for a drink in a bar, 20% in a full-service restaurant and so on.

But there is of course very little logic to the whole business of who we tip and who we do not.

Obviously, no-one slips their heart surgeon or airline pilot something a little extra at the end of an operation or a flight, because they earn too much for that to make sense. But why tip a waiter and not a shop assistant?

Or the driver of a taxi, but not the driver of a bus?

It is probably because historically there were certain transactions only open to the rich, including having your hair cut by someone who was not a blood relation and going to a restaurant.

And if it were as simple as that, I would be happy enough, but of course it is not.

Any server worth their salt is going to try to persuade you that the two of you have been on a kind of journey together through your meal which can only be properly consummated with cash.

Sometimes if you are British this will begin with a moment of awkwardness.

A young man in Jackson, Mississippi, once recognised my accent: "Like the Beatles, right?" he said and asked nervously if I knew about "the tipping thing".

I confirmed that rumours of it had reached our side of the Atlantic, but had been received with widespread disbelief.

Often a server will squat on their haunches to give them eye contact as they would with a recalcitrant toddler and then act as though you are co-conspirators in a plot to give you a heart attack: "Have we saved room for dessert?"

It is not confined to the restaurant trade either. I know a hotel in Manhattan which employs a team of doormen to get your cases from taxi to lobby.

They work in the manner of medieval peasants passing buckets of water from hand to hand to fight a fire. The idea is that you are meant to tip each of them, although of course it would be cheaper to buy new suitcases and clothes after checking in.

Avoiding disfavour

And to me there is something un-American at the heart of the whole idea of tipping.

Think back to the restaurant. It does not take any more effort or skill to serve a $10 bottle of wine than it does to serve one that costs 100. Multiplying the service charge by 10 is a kind of a private, self-imposed wealth tax, rather than a tip.

And yet somehow when the bill appears, most of us, most of the time, do add that little something, or indeed that rather substantial something, all to avoid the fleeting disfavour of someone whose professional charm has passed briefly over us like intermittent illumination from a distant lighthouse.

Not me of course.

I really feel we have been on a journey together here and I hope you do too.

So if there is no other part of speech I can bring you, a last thought-provoking compound adjective for instance, I will leave you.

You have an outstanding day now!

Monday, February 16, 2009

Romans 12

Romans 12 is now my favorite chapter of the Bible. God's words pierce into the very heart of what I struggle with-finding joy in Christ. Not just the preservation of personal happiness, but the joy rooted in hope

Romans 12
Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God--this is your spiritual act of worship. Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is--his good, pleasing and perfect will. For by the grace given me I say to every one of you: Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment, in accordance with the measure of faith God has given you. Just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, so in Christ we who are many form one body, and each member belongs to all the others.

I could go on, but these first four verses just blew me away with the conviction that I have been slowly descending into the depths of conformation with the world. It may seem akin to peer pressure or dismissed as a hackneyed phrase, but it is quite possible to be absorbed into the feel0good, self-satisfying, and self-preserving mentality that pervades the world. One thing that struck me during the CGIU conference this past weekend was the waning of my passion. One or two months before I would be absolutely ecstatic and enthusiastic about the ways God is using me in the volunteer and fellowship activities. I would not be able to contain my passion. Now, I find myself saying things without conviction-rather, my words carry across a hint of arrogance and pride. I find the loathsome reality that my passion is being swallowed by the world's applause and recognition. We're the ones who are going to "change the world," to use our efforts for the "good of humankind," the "noble" ones who forsake our own lives for the embetterment of others, etcetera etcetera et...what?
What is the true goal of this? Is it to pat each other on the back for our "outstanding" achievement? Is it to impress everyone we meet with our "selflessness"? Or is it the ultimate gesture of selfishness-that we would parade our efforts and our so-called "passions" before the world so that we would receive more credit, honor, and glory?
Of course it depends from person to person, and I can almost envision someone's arguing voice saying "You can't generalize that!" But I have to look into these acts and go to the heart motive: if you are not Christian, what is the end goal? It is quite evident that it is the self-satisfaction that you have made a difference in others' lives. There's nothing wrong with that. But what happens when you fail? What happens when the success stories don't come your way?
Then you have nothing.
You didn't make a difference.
What then?
You were ineffective.
What then?

For the Christian, it is: praise God, for even if I see nothing-I persevere for His sake. Even if I die before I see anything, it is for His sake. His will and eternal glory never fades, even when my efforts fail and my life is drained of its energy.

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Indispensable?

Tired, exhausted, destroyed.

I feel like I am being tested from every angle, that my efforts have all been in vain.

For the small group meeting today, I basically went to the bathroom and, as I was washing my hands, was just crushed by an overwhelming sense of fatigue and sadness. Why?

I don't take rejection very well. Especially when my time is invested. It's like the first meeting that we had of Step Ahead, where we had all the tutors lined up and ready-and then nobody came.

The fact that there are people to whom I yearn to reach out, yet am constrained by commitments such as these-it makes me extremely angry and frustrated when others take it for granted. They assume that I will always be there-patient, loving, caring. Even with the devoted one and half hours, can they just ignore the sacrifice of the same amount of time spent in earnest prayer and preparation?

My human side screams foul. It denounces them with a sharp, bitter anger and smoldering resentment. How dare they take me for granted? What if I suddenly disappeared from their lives? Would it be any different?

And then, the anger becomes sadness. Have I lost my touch with God? Has He forsaken me?
How come I spend the hours before seeking His will and His direction, what He wants to reveal to His sons-and then nothing comes out? Everyone disappears without a trace, without any notification.

But I know that God is faithful. I remember 2 Timothy 2:13 If we are faithless, he remains faithful, for he cannot disown himself.

God will never stop being faithful, even when other people or myself prove faithless. When I felt the burden of failure and of perceived rejection...but as I was walking through the mao mao rain...I looked up and realized-God will take care of them.

God is faithful. He will grow these guys to be leaders, to be servants in His kingdom. and here was the key: with or without me.

I am dispensable. I am merely His vessel, His servant. I can fail in everything EXCEPT in my recognition of God's faithfulness! I must have faith with faithfulness, and be consistent in my service and walk with Him, but ultimately I trust in HIS truth, and HIS will.

Is this ministry called "Dennis's" ministry? Does it have the marks of one man's vision? NO. It has a divine, all-encompassing vision that engulfs time itself. It is divine, it demands my service. I submit myself to Him regardless of the consequences, regardless of the results. I am His saved, His sheep, His son. May I never forget this.

Sunday, February 8, 2009

I realized just now that my latin is incorrect.

Apparently, it's Soli Deo Gloria. my internet sources lied to me.

Today, I felt so lethargic...like everything was going by in a blur. I yearn to spend time with the One who satisfies, the One who gives me the joy and life that I need!
Sometimes (like today) my heart sinks at the prospect of facing the enormous tasks set before me...and the many tasks start to burden and oppress me. Yet I just have to look to the sky-to the Lord above-or into my heart, where His name is written-and I am completely blown away.
My little credentials, my ambitions, my vices, my virtues-what is that in context to eternity? How can this compare to the Almighty, awesome God?
When I see the blessings that He has bestowed upon our fellowship, I am not just thankful-I'm blown-away-thankful. The reason that we love each other, the reason that we "hang out" is not necessarily just personal attraction; it's GOD! Out of His wisdom and love, He gave us the sweet fellowship and spiritual intimacy that we enjoy. My hope and my prayer is that our fellowship would not become stagnant, and begin to seek human relationships above divine ones!
Many times, my personal insecurity stems from this: rejecting the relationship with God as insufficient for my needs, and rather trying to plug this hole with others: other friends, other people. He is all I need. He must be all I need. For me to glorify Him, I need to love Him more than anything else: my friends, my family, even my future spouse.
Can I say that with certainty?
Certainly...not. Honestly, I am by nature quite insecure-especially when my attempts for friendship fail. Yet, in that weakness I cry out to my Abba, Father, who loves me and whose Presence time and again reassures me of this uncontainable, holy love.
I cannot understate how God has used others to encourage me, and me to encourage others. I know that with God's heart, I can see the pain and the sorrow, the loneliness and the wayward heart of those people around me. BUT what do I do? Do I go and try to ease the pain? Do I touch their lives to heal them?
My natural reaction is YES! They need it! I'll go right now!
But God says...NO. Wait on my timing. Listen to me. I will use you according to My will, so that you cannot claim even a modicum of glory.

Isaiah 64:1-9

1 Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down,
that the mountains would tremble before you!

2 As when fire sets twigs ablaze
and causes water to boil,
come down to make your name known to your enemies
and cause the nations to quake before you!

3 For when you did awesome things that we did not expect,
you came down, and the mountains trembled before you.

4 Since ancient times no one has heard,
no ear has perceived,
no eye has seen any God besides you,
who acts on behalf of those who wait for him.

5 You come to the help of those who gladly do right,
who remember your ways.
But when we continued to sin against them,
you were angry.
How then can we be saved?

6 All of us have become like one who is unclean,
and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags;
we all shrivel up like a leaf,
and like the wind our sins sweep us away.

7 No one calls on your name
or strives to lay hold of you;
for you have hidden your face from us
and made us waste away because of our sins.

8 Yet, O LORD, you are our Father.
We are the clay, you are the potter;
we are all the work of your hand.

9 Do not be angry beyond measure, O LORD;
do not remember our sins forever.
Oh, look upon us, we pray,
for we are all your people.

Thursday, February 5, 2009

Praise God! tonight's Education Panel was a success :-D
I was so encouraged and motivated to work towards a better future-but specifically in touching lives. What carried the panel tonight was the plethora of stories-of individuals who loved and, after a prolonged struggle between a mistrusting and calloused heart versus uncompromising, unwavering dedication-saw the hard-earned fruit of hope and love of learning. How one child can be changed; how the young are molded; how life's direction shifts radically after just one compassionate, "positive" person enters in and takes a stand. How recognizable is this story! Isn't this the story of every person, every sinner, who looks at God and says: Why do you love me? Why do you care so much? I don't mean anything to you. I can't do anything for you. Yet, here you are...and you sacrifice everything just so that I could be with you, so that I could have a glimpse of heaven and taste of your infinite glory. WHY?! Why do you not give up?
And blessed are those who turn and respond, saying: YES, I know that You love me, and I LOVE YOU. To show my gratitude for your love, I will turn and strengthen my brothers, who are also in your love. I will be like that ten-year-old, who once assured of his teacher believing in him, encouraged and exhorted the entire class to greater heights. He is unlike someone who dismisses this as foolishness-that this person's crazy, that this type of love and affection is contrived and never existed-or, worse, takes this love and hoards it for himself, always taking from God and never loving Him back by reaching out to others. Instead, he gives because he has received what has been freely given.
Praise God, Praise God, Praise God.

Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Today I have not felt more frustrated with myself.
A litany of failed attempts and veiled insecurities...along with a generous helping of gloom. Is this depression?

I am tempted to say, "I am being tested." I have been targeted because of what I have been doing for the Lord. Yet, is that the entire picture? Am I simply a noble martyr who suffers in silence?

A resounding NO. Would that I could glory in my suffering (in this case, publicize how awful life has been), and come across as a whining, sniveling child? Or will I rejoice in my suffering, knowing that the LORD has already claimed victory? I praise God for today, tomorrow, the rest of my life. Although I cannot control the events that happen, I can look to Jesus Christ for sustenance and life. Amidst the chaos, He gives me the peace and joy...that goes to hope overflowing through the strength and power of His Spirit.

Yet something I have begun to ponder is the question about why the cross is such a stumbling block for so many. Paul addresses it in his letter to the Corinthians, in 1 Corinthians 1:18
For the message of the cross is foolishness to us who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God

The cross? As foolishness? This requires a bit of thought. What is the "message of the cross"? How could the Jews, who wanted miracles, and the Gentiles, who wanted wisdom, throw this away?

Tuesday, February 3, 2009

The Disadvantages of an Elite Education

The Disadvantages of an Elite Education

Posted By William Deresiewicz On June 1, 2008 @ 7:00 am In Article, Cover Story, Exhortation, Summer 2008 | No Comments

It didn’t dawn on me that there might be a few holes in my education until I was about 35. I’d just bought a house, the pipes needed fixing, and the plumber was standing in my kitchen. There he was, a short, beefy guy with a goatee and a Red Sox cap and a thick Boston accent, and I suddenly learned that I didn’t have the slightest idea what to say to someone like him. So alien was his experience to me, so unguessable his values, so mysterious his very language, that I couldn’t succeed in engaging him in a few minutes of small talk before he got down to work. Fourteen years of higher education and a handful of Ivy League degrees, and there I was, stiff and stupid, struck dumb by my own dumbness. “Ivy retardation,” a friend of mine calls this. I could carry on conversations with people from other countries, in other languages, but I couldn’t talk to the man who was standing in my own house.

It’s not surprising that it took me so long to discover the extent of my miseducation, because the last thing an elite education will teach you is its own inadequacy. As two dozen years at Yale and Columbia have shown me, elite colleges relentlessly encourage their students to flatter themselves for being there, and for what being there can do for them. The advantages of an elite education are indeed undeniable. You learn to think, at least in certain ways, and you make the contacts needed to launch yourself into a life rich in all of society’s most cherished rewards. To consider that while some opportunities are being created, others are being cancelled and that while some abilities are being developed, others are being crippled is, within this context, not only outrageous, but inconceivable.

I’m not talking about curricula or the culture wars, the closing or opening of the American mind, political correctness, canon formation, or what have you. I’m talking about the whole system in which these skirmishes play out. Not just the Ivy League and its peer institutions, but also the mechanisms that get you there in the first place: the private and affluent public “feeder” schools, the ever-growing parastructure of tutors and test-prep courses and enrichment programs, the whole admissions frenzy and everything that leads up to and away from it. The message, as always, is the medium. Before, after, and around the elite college classroom, a constellation of values is ceaselessly inculcated. As globalization sharpens economic insecurity, we are increasingly committing ourselves—as students, as parents, as a society—to a vast apparatus of educational advantage. With so many resources devoted to the business of elite academics and so many people scrambling for the limited space at the top of the ladder, it is worth asking what exactly it is you get in the end—what it is we all get, because the elite students of today, as their institutions never tire of reminding them, are the leaders of tomorrow.

The first disadvantage of an elite education, as I learned in my kitchen that day, is that it makes you incapable of talking to people who aren’t like you. Elite schools pride themselves on their diversity, but that diversity is almost entirely a matter of ethnicity and race. With respect to class, these schools are largely—indeed increasingly—homogeneous. Visit any elite campus in our great nation and you can thrill to the heartwarming spectacle of the children of white businesspeople and professionals studying and playing alongside the children of black, Asian, and Latino businesspeople and professionals. At the same time, because these schools tend to cultivate liberal attitudes, they leave their students in the paradoxical position of wanting to advocate on behalf of the working class while being unable to hold a simple conversation with anyone in it. Witness the last two Democratic presidential nominees, Al Gore and John Kerry: one each from Harvard and Yale, both earnest, decent, intelligent men, both utterly incapable of communicating with the larger electorate.

But it isn’t just a matter of class. My education taught me to believe that people who didn’t go to an Ivy League or equivalent school weren’t worth talking to, regardless of their class. I was given the unmistakable message that such people were beneath me. We were “the best and the brightest,” as these places love to say, and everyone else was, well, something else: less good, less bright. I learned to give that little nod of understanding, that slightly sympathetic “Oh,” when people told me they went to a less prestigious college. (If I’d gone to Harvard, I would have learned to say “in Boston” when I was asked where I went to school—the Cambridge version of noblesse oblige.) I never learned that there are smart people who don’t go to elite colleges, often precisely for reasons of class. I never learned that there are smart people who don’t go to college at all.

I also never learned that there are smart people who aren’t “smart.” The existence of multiple forms of intelligence has become a commonplace, but however much elite universities like to sprinkle their incoming classes with a few actors or violinists, they select for and develop one form of intelligence: the analytic. While this is broadly true of all universities, elite schools, precisely because their students (and faculty, and administrators) possess this one form of intelligence to such a high degree, are more apt to ignore the value of others. One naturally prizes what one most possesses and what most makes for one’s advantages. But social intelligence and emotional intelligence and creative ability, to name just three other forms, are not distributed preferentially among the educational elite. The “best” are the brightest only in one narrow sense. One needs to wander away from the educational elite to begin to discover this.

What about people who aren’t bright in any sense? I have a friend who went to an Ivy League college after graduating from a typically mediocre public high school. One of the values of going to such a school, she once said, is that it teaches you to relate to stupid people. Some people are smart in the elite-college way, some are smart in other ways, and some aren’t smart at all. It should be embarrassing not to know how to talk to any of them, if only because talking to people is the only real way of knowing them. Elite institutions are supposed to provide a humanistic education, but the first principle of humanism is Terence’s: “nothing human is alien to me.” The first disadvantage of an elite education is how very much of the human it alienates you from.

The second disadvantage, implicit in what I’ve been saying, is that an elite education inculcates a false sense of self-worth. Getting to an elite college, being at an elite college, and going on from an elite college—all involve numerical rankings: SAT, GPA, GRE. You learn to think of yourself in terms of those numbers. They come to signify not only your fate, but your identity; not only your identity, but your value. It’s been said that what those tests really measure is your ability to take tests, but even if they measure something real, it is only a small slice of the real. The problem begins when students are encouraged to forget this truth, when academic excellence becomes excellence in some absolute sense, when “better at X” becomes simply “better.”

There is nothing wrong with taking pride in one’s intellect or knowledge. There is something wrong with the smugness and self-congratulation that elite schools connive at from the moment the fat envelopes come in the mail. From orientation to graduation, the message is implicit in every tone of voice and tilt of the head, every old-school tradition, every article in the student paper, every speech from the dean. The message is: You have arrived. Welcome to the club. And the corollary is equally clear: You deserve everything your presence here is going to enable you to get. When people say that students at elite schools have a strong sense of entitlement, they mean that those students think they deserve more than other people because their sat scores are higher.

At Yale, and no doubt at other places, the message is reinforced in embarrassingly literal terms. The physical form of the university—its quads and residential colleges, with their Gothic stone façades and wrought-iron portals—is constituted by the locked gate set into the encircling wall. Everyone carries around an ID card that determines which gates they can enter. The gate, in other words, is a kind of governing metaphor—because the social form of the university, as is true of every elite school, is constituted the same way. Elite colleges are walled domains guarded by locked gates, with admission granted only to the elect. The aptitude with which students absorb this lesson is demonstrated by the avidity with which they erect still more gates within those gates, special realms of ever-greater exclusivity—at Yale, the famous secret societies, or as they should probably be called, the open-secret societies, since true secrecy would defeat their purpose. There’s no point in excluding people unless they know they’ve been excluded.

One of the great errors of an elite education, then, is that it teaches you to think that measures of intelligence and academic achievement are measures of value in some moral or metaphysical sense. But they’re not. Graduates of elite schools are not more valuable than stupid people, or talentless people, or even lazy people. Their pain does not hurt more. Their souls do not weigh more. If I were religious, I would say, God does not love them more. The political implications should be clear. As John Ruskin told an older elite, grabbing what you can get isn’t any less wicked when you grab it with the power of your brains than with the power of your fists. “Work must always be,” Ruskin says, “and captains of work must always be….[But] there is a wide difference between being captains…of work, and taking the profits of it.”

The political implications don’t stop there. An elite education not only ushers you into the upper classes; it trains you for the life you will lead once you get there. I didn’t understand this until I began comparing my experience, and even more, my students’ experience, with the experience of a friend of mine who went to Cleveland State. There are due dates and attendance requirements at places like Yale, but no one takes them very seriously. Extensions are available for the asking; threats to deduct credit for missed classes are rarely, if ever, carried out. In other words, students at places like Yale get an endless string of second chances. Not so at places like Cleveland State. My friend once got a D in a class in which she’d been running an A because she was coming off a waitressing shift and had to hand in her term paper an hour late.

That may be an extreme example, but it is unthinkable at an elite school. Just as unthinkably, she had no one to appeal to. Students at places like Cleveland State, unlike those at places like Yale, don’t have a platoon of advisers and tutors and deans to write out excuses for late work, give them extra help when they need it, pick them up when they fall down. They get their education wholesale, from an indifferent bureaucracy; it’s not handed to them in individually wrapped packages by smiling clerks. There are few, if any, opportunities for the kind of contacts I saw my students get routinely—classes with visiting power brokers, dinners with foreign dignitaries. There are also few, if any, of the kind of special funds that, at places like Yale, are available in profusion: travel stipends, research fellowships, performance grants. Each year, my department at Yale awards dozens of cash prizes for everything from freshman essays to senior projects. This year, those awards came to more than $90,000—in just one department.

Students at places like Cleveland State also don’t get A-’s just for doing the work. There’s been a lot of handwringing lately over grade inflation, and it is a scandal, but the most scandalous thing about it is how uneven it’s been. Forty years ago, the average GPA at both public and private universities was about 2.6, still close to the traditional B-/C+ curve. Since then, it’s gone up everywhere, but not by anything like the same amount. The average gpa at public universities is now about 3.0, a B; at private universities it’s about 3.3, just short of a B+. And at most Ivy League schools, it’s closer to 3.4. But there are always students who don’t do the work, or who are taking a class far outside their field (for fun or to fulfill a requirement), or who aren’t up to standard to begin with (athletes, legacies). At a school like Yale, students who come to class and work hard expect nothing less than an A-. And most of the time, they get it.

In short, the way students are treated in college trains them for the social position they will occupy once they get out. At schools like Cleveland State, they’re being trained for positions somewhere in the middle of the class system, in the depths of one bureaucracy or another. They’re being conditioned for lives with few second chances, no extensions, little support, narrow opportunity—lives of subordination, supervision, and control, lives of deadlines, not guidelines. At places like Yale, of course, it’s the reverse. The elite like to think of themselves as belonging to a meritocracy, but that’s true only up to a point. Getting through the gate is very difficult, but once you’re in, there’s almost nothing you can do to get kicked out. Not the most abject academic failure, not the most heinous act of plagiarism, not even threatening a fellow student with bodily harm—I’ve heard of all three—will get you expelled. The feeling is that, by gosh, it just wouldn’t be fair—in other words, the self-protectiveness of the old-boy network, even if it now includes girls. Elite schools nurture excellence, but they also nurture what a former Yale graduate student I know calls “entitled mediocrity.” A is the mark of excellence; A- is the mark of entitled mediocrity. It’s another one of those metaphors, not so much a grade as a promise. It means, don’t worry, we’ll take care of you. You may not be all that good, but you’re good enough.

Here, too, college reflects the way things work in the adult world (unless it’s the other way around). For the elite, there’s always another extension—a bailout, a pardon, a stint in rehab—always plenty of contacts and special stipends—the country club, the conference, the year-end bonus, the dividend. If Al Gore and John Kerry represent one of the characteristic products of an elite education, George W. Bush represents another. It’s no coincidence that our current president, the apotheosis of entitled mediocrity, went to Yale. Entitled mediocrity is indeed the operating principle of his administration, but as Enron and WorldCom and the other scandals of the dot-com meltdown demonstrated, it’s also the operating principle of corporate America. The fat salaries paid to underperforming CEOs are an adult version of the A-. Anyone who remembers the injured sanctimony with which Kenneth Lay greeted the notion that he should be held accountable for his actions will understand the mentality in question—the belief that once you’re in the club, you’ve got a God-given right to stay in the club. But you don’t need to remember Ken Lay, because the whole dynamic played out again last year in the case of Scooter Libby, another Yale man.

If one of the disadvantages of an elite education is the temptation it offers to mediocrity, another is the temptation it offers to security. When parents explain why they work so hard to give their children the best possible education, they invariably say it is because of the opportunities it opens up. But what of the opportunities it shuts down? An elite education gives you the chance to be rich—which is, after all, what we’re talking about—but it takes away the chance not to be. Yet the opportunity not to be rich is one of the greatest opportunities with which young Americans have been blessed. We live in a society that is itself so wealthy that it can afford to provide a decent living to whole classes of people who in other countries exist (or in earlier times existed) on the brink of poverty or, at least, of indignity. You can live comfortably in the United States as a schoolteacher, or a community organizer, or a civil rights lawyer, or an artist—that is, by any reasonable definition of comfort. You have to live in an ordinary house instead of an apartment in Manhattan or a mansion in L.A.; you have to drive a Honda instead of a BMW or a Hummer; you have to vacation in Florida instead of Barbados or Paris, but what are such losses when set against the opportunity to do work you believe in, work you’re suited for, work you love, every day of your life?

Yet it is precisely that opportunity that an elite education takes away. How can I be a schoolteacher—wouldn’t that be a waste of my expensive education? Wouldn’t I be squandering the opportunities my parents worked so hard to provide? What will my friends think? How will I face my classmates at our 20th reunion, when they’re all rich lawyers or important people in New York? And the question that lies behind all these: Isn’t it beneath me? So a whole universe of possibility closes, and you miss your true calling.

This is not to say that students from elite colleges never pursue a riskier or less lucrative course after graduation, but even when they do, they tend to give up more quickly than others. (Let’s not even talk about the possibility of kids from privileged backgrounds not going to college at all, or delaying matriculation for several years, because however appropriate such choices might sometimes be, our rigid educational mentality places them outside the universe of possibility—the reason so many kids go sleepwalking off to college with no idea what they’re doing there.) This doesn’t seem to make sense, especially since students from elite schools tend to graduate with less debt and are more likely to be able to float by on family money for a while. I wasn’t aware of the phenomenon myself until I heard about it from a couple of graduate students in my department, one from Yale, one from Harvard. They were talking about trying to write poetry, how friends of theirs from college called it quits within a year or two while people they know from less prestigious schools are still at it. Why should this be? Because students from elite schools expect success, and expect it now. They have, by definition, never experienced anything else, and their sense of self has been built around their ability to succeed. The idea of not being successful terrifies them, disorients them, defeats them. They’ve been driven their whole lives by a fear of failure—often, in the first instance, by their parents’ fear of failure. The first time I blew a test, I walked out of the room feeling like I no longer knew who I was. The second time, it was easier; I had started to learn that failure isn’t the end of the world.

But if you’re afraid to fail, you’re afraid to take risks, which begins to explain the final and most damning disadvantage of an elite education: that it is profoundly anti-intellectual. This will seem counterintuitive. Aren’t kids at elite schools the smartest ones around, at least in the narrow academic sense? Don’t they work harder than anyone else—indeed, harder than any previous generation? They are. They do. But being an intellectual is not the same as being smart. Being an intellectual means more than doing your homework.

If so few kids come to college understanding this, it is no wonder. They are products of a system that rarely asked them to think about something bigger than the next assignment. The system forgot to teach them, along the way to the prestige admissions and the lucrative jobs, that the most important achievements can’t be measured by a letter or a number or a name. It forgot that the true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers.

Being an intellectual means, first of all, being passionate about ideas—and not just for the duration of a semester, for the sake of pleasing the teacher, or for getting a good grade. A friend who teaches at the University of Connecticut once complained to me that his students don’t think for themselves. Well, I said, Yale students think for themselves, but only because they know we want them to. I’ve had many wonderful students at Yale and Columbia, bright, thoughtful, creative kids whom it’s been a pleasure to talk with and learn from. But most of them have seemed content to color within the lines that their education had marked out for them. Only a small minority have seen their education as part of a larger intellectual journey, have approached the work of the mind with a pilgrim soul. These few have tended to feel like freaks, not least because they get so little support from the university itself. Places like Yale, as one of them put it to me, are not conducive to searchers.

Places like Yale are simply not set up to help students ask the big questions. I don’t think there ever was a golden age of intellectualism in the American university, but in the 19th century students might at least have had a chance to hear such questions raised in chapel or in the literary societies and debating clubs that flourished on campus. Throughout much of the 20th century, with the growth of the humanistic ideal in American colleges, students might have encountered the big questions in the classrooms of professors possessed of a strong sense of pedagogic mission. Teachers like that still exist in this country, but the increasingly dire exigencies of academic professionalization have made them all but extinct at elite universities. Professors at top research institutions are valued exclusively for the quality of their scholarly work; time spent on teaching is time lost. If students want a conversion experience, they’re better off at a liberal arts college.

When elite universities boast that they teach their students how to think, they mean that they teach them the analytic and rhetorical skills necessary for success in law or medicine or science or business. But a humanistic education is supposed to mean something more than that, as universities still dimly feel. So when students get to college, they hear a couple of speeches telling them to ask the big questions, and when they graduate, they hear a couple more speeches telling them to ask the big questions. And in between, they spend four years taking courses that train them to ask the little questions—specialized courses, taught by specialized professors, aimed at specialized students. Although the notion of breadth is implicit in the very idea of a liberal arts education, the admissions process increasingly selects for kids who have already begun to think of themselves in specialized terms—the junior journalist, the budding astronomer, the language prodigy. We are slouching, even at elite schools, toward a glorified form of vocational training.

Indeed, that seems to be exactly what those schools want. There’s a reason elite schools speak of training leaders, not thinkers—holders of power, not its critics. An independent mind is independent of all allegiances, and elite schools, which get a large percentage of their budget from alumni giving, are strongly invested in fostering institutional loyalty. As another friend, a third-generation Yalie, says, the purpose of Yale College is to manufacture Yale alumni. Of course, for the system to work, those alumni need money. At Yale, the long-term drift of students away from majors in the humanities and basic sciences toward more practical ones like computer science and economics has been abetted by administrative indifference. The college career office has little to say to students not interested in law, medicine, or business, and elite universities are not going to do anything to discourage the large percentage of their graduates who take their degrees to Wall Street. In fact, they’re showing them the way. The liberal arts university is becoming the corporate university, its center of gravity shifting to technical fields where scholarly expertise can be parlayed into lucrative business opportunities.

It’s no wonder that the few students who are passionate about ideas find themselves feeling isolated and confused. I was talking with one of them last year about his interest in the German Romantic idea of bildung, the upbuilding of the soul. But, he said—he was a senior at the time—it’s hard to build your soul when everyone around you is trying to sell theirs.

Yet there is a dimension of the intellectual life that lies above the passion for ideas, though so thoroughly has our culture been sanitized of it that it is hardly surprising if it was beyond the reach of even my most alert students. Since the idea of the intellectual emerged in the 18th century, it has had, at its core, a commitment to social transformation. Being an intellectual means thinking your way toward a vision of the good society and then trying to realize that vision by speaking truth to power. It means going into spiritual exile. It means foreswearing your allegiance, in lonely freedom, to God, to country, and to Yale. It takes more than just intellect; it takes imagination and courage. “I am not afraid to make a mistake,” Stephen Dedalus says, “even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake, and perhaps as long as eternity, too.”

Being an intellectual begins with thinking your way outside of your assumptions and the system that enforces them. But students who get into elite schools are precisely the ones who have best learned to work within the system, so it’s almost impossible for them to see outside it, to see that it’s even there. Long before they got to college, they turned themselves into world-class hoop-jumpers and teacher-pleasers, getting A’s in every class no matter how boring they found the teacher or how pointless the subject, racking up eight or 10 extracurricular activities no matter what else they wanted to do with their time. Paradoxically, the situation may be better at second-tier schools and, in particular, again, at liberal arts colleges than at the most prestigious universities. Some students end up at second-tier schools because they’re exactly like students at Harvard or Yale, only less gifted or driven. But others end up there because they have a more independent spirit. They didn’t get straight A’s because they couldn’t be bothered to give everything in every class. They concentrated on the ones that meant the most to them or on a single strong extracurricular passion or on projects that had nothing to do with school or even with looking good on a college application. Maybe they just sat in their room, reading a lot and writing in their journal. These are the kinds of kids who are likely, once they get to college, to be more interested in the human spirit than in school spirit, and to think about leaving college bearing questions, not resumés.

I’ve been struck, during my time at Yale, by how similar everyone looks. You hardly see any hippies or punks or art-school types, and at a college that was known in the ’80s as the Gay Ivy, few out lesbians and no gender queers. The geeks don’t look all that geeky; the fashionable kids go in for understated elegance. Thirty-two flavors, all of them vanilla. The most elite schools have become places of a narrow and suffocating normalcy. Everyone feels pressure to maintain the kind of appearance—and affect—that go with achievement. (Dress for success, medicate for success.) I know from long experience as an adviser that not every Yale student is appropriate and well-adjusted, which is exactly why it worries me that so many of them act that way. The tyranny of the normal must be very heavy in their lives. One consequence is that those who can’t get with the program (and they tend to be students from poorer backgrounds) often polarize in the opposite direction, flying off into extremes of disaffection and self-destruction. But another consequence has to do with the large majority who can get with the program.

I taught a class several years ago on the literature of friendship. One day we were discussing Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves, which follows a group of friends from childhood to middle age. In high school, one of them falls in love with another boy. He thinks, “To whom can I expose the urgency of my own passion?…There is nobody—here among these grey arches, and moaning pigeons, and cheerful games and tradition and emulation, all so skilfully organised to prevent feeling alone.” A pretty good description of an elite college campus, including the part about never being allowed to feel alone. What did my students think of this, I wanted to know? What does it mean to go to school at a place where you’re never alone? Well, one of them said, I do feel uncomfortable sitting in my room by myself. Even when I have to write a paper, I do it at a friend’s. That same day, as it happened, another student gave a presentation on Emerson’s essay on friendship. Emerson says, he reported, that one of the purposes of friendship is to equip you for solitude. As I was asking my students what they thought that meant, one of them interrupted to say, wait a second, why do you need solitude in the first place? What can you do by yourself that you can’t do with a friend?

So there they were: one young person who had lost the capacity for solitude and another who couldn’t see the point of it. There’s been much talk of late about the loss of privacy, but equally calamitous is its corollary, the loss of solitude. It used to be that you couldn’t always get together with your friends even when you wanted to. Now that students are in constant electronic contact, they never have trouble finding each other. But it’s not as if their compulsive sociability is enabling them to develop deep friendships. “To whom can I expose the urgency of my own passion?”: my student was in her friend’s room writing a paper, not having a heart-to-heart. She probably didn’t have the time; indeed, other students told me they found their peers too busy for intimacy.

What happens when busyness and sociability leave no room for solitude? The ability to engage in introspection, I put it to my students that day, is the essential precondition for living an intellectual life, and the essential precondition for introspection is solitude. They took this in for a second, and then one of them said, with a dawning sense of self-awareness, “So are you saying that we’re all just, like, really excellent sheep?” Well, I don’t know. But I do know that the life of the mind is lived one mind at a time: one solitary, skeptical, resistant mind at a time. The best place to cultivate it is not within an educational system whose real purpose is to reproduce the class system.

The world that produced John Kerry and George Bush is indeed giving us our next generation of leaders. The kid who’s loading up on AP courses junior year or editing three campus publications while double-majoring, the kid whom everyone wants at their college or law school but no one wants in their classroom, the kid who doesn’t have a minute to breathe, let alone think, will soon be running a corporation or an institution or a government. She will have many achievements but little experience, great success but no vision. The disadvantage of an elite education is that it’s given us the elite we have, and the elite we’re going to have.