For a College Student,

       I thought I'd take another shot at sharing some things I think are pretty important for college students to know, particularly those young adults on the very threshold of their lives.

       I've written letters to college students before on this site, but I confess I think I've been a bit too obtuse. I do believe the things I've said have been fine things, and you can link to them here if you're interested. Here I'd like to get right to it a bit more affably. It's a challenge, but here goes. (And for those who wonder why I'm anybody at all to begin with, just click the little blue box there to the right so you may know a bit more about me.)

       The reason I have a special address to college students here in my webzine is pretty simple. College students have the most fresh, profound, and intense desire to use their gifts to change the world, in whatever way that is.

       At the risk of being too pedantic, I must say I see so much awesome stuff going on in colleges, whether it is in the classroom, out around the campus, or especially in all the places around the world college students get to go simply to expand their horizons and divine the novel ways they can blow away the world. I'm jealous! They're so eagerly after more meaningful scientific approaches, more spectacular works of art and architecture, and more vibrant ways to engage culture.

       The purpose of it all is to magnificently augment those things we all desperately need: Belonging, discovery, accomplishment. Really, as long as we're with others who'll affirm us in some way, we're seeing things happening all around that engage us, and we're a significant part of making things happen that go beyond ourselves, we're in pretty good shape.

       All that stuff about drinking and smoking and copulating indiscriminately? We do that stuff only when we're not getting those three things met.

       While it looks like college is the place where all that great stuff happens, and it does, there is still too much of the destructive pain-numbing stuff going on. It is quite the paradox: great achievement amidst such abject despair. You'll always then hear a lot of moralizing from one group or another, while others may just as easily say "Shut up and leave us alone." Okay, that's cool. But I do think a few would like to know how to get on to having the three major things there happening a lot more often.

       I really think the answer is in a Person, and He is Jesus Christ. The tricky part is that it is rather difficult to say "Jesus is the answer" to so many who are taught that this character is something He isn't.

       Really, that is why I so long to share Him with college students. It is because in many ways higher education in the World System sustains a deliberately designed program to quite proficiently convince young people that Jesus is who they say Jesus is.

       When this "Jesus" is so pronounced in the mind of a young person, one of two things generally happen. One, the beholder will jump on the bandwagon and worship him because they think he is the real one, and really all they do is practice idolatry. Two, "Jesus" will be rejected because he is simply not part of one's interpretive community, and some other item will be adopted as the thing from which one must receive fulfillment. In the college realm that "Jesus" is often merely expressed as "I want to be free to do whatever it is I want with no one telling me what that is."

       That sounds very liberating, and some measure of self-autonomy is a very good thing. But the truth is each of us is following someone and their ideas. It doesn't matter how much you are your own kind of person, your own ideas about things have come from somewhere, indeed someone, and you've merely concurred. Sometimes this assent happens so deep in the soul that you don't even know you've done it.

       Many who worship the tolerance god may bleat that none of this is any big deal, but the fact remains, ideas have consequences. Furthermore, how those ideas manifest themselves in reality is hidden to the intellectually lazy and manipulated by the well-connected. Those sucked into the World System's collegiate indoctrination program are the most dangerous because they are so intelligent yet so seduced by the deceptive arts used against them.

       I'd like to close this letter by simply asking you,

       Do you know who you are following?

       I spend some time in this website sharing some ideas about that very thing. And I also share a little about what it means to know who Jesus really is. I don't have it down completely, I know. But that's okay, He's good with the adventure that is a growing relationship with Him.

       For it is from Him and by Him that all the great college stuff has meaning to begin with.

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Why Jesus?

Some other Jesuses

What it is exactly that keeps churches grafted to the World System

More for a College Student

(For the particularly abrasive cynic, you'll note that this site has no request for or link to make any donation. There is no address or post office box to mail anything. There exists no organization in any building anywhere, though a gathering of individuals in a building is not a bad thing. Ample funding of a fine work is not a bad thing either, though Jesus was far more interested in people worshipping God in Spirit and in Truth, and out of that wholly caring for one another in a community in which all enjoy His bountiful provision. The true church should have no name except that which comes from the vibrant expression of His love through them in a World desperate for what is real. I will add that I do provide an email address for you to ask questions or add a comment if you'd like. I'd certainly like to know what you think.)