things will fall apart without You

So I'm sitting in my room, the lone junior in a hall full of sophomores who have just returned to school today, and man, I am so convicted of this right now: Everything (everything!) will fall apart without Jesus.  There's just no way it stands--anything stands--without Twereduampon, the tree against which we lean and do not fall, as the Akans of Ghana call him.

There's a lot of shouting three floors below me, on the vast, dewy quad traversed by overeager students zealous to make up for summer evenings not spent partying with their college friends.  And I think of the last week of training I've undergone, training as an assistant resident adviser, and how everything's just sheer chaos without Jesus at the center.  How you can keep searching for that intangible sufficiency, searching as you run across the quad with the breathless exhilaration of the night that beckons, for some drug that will quell your insufficiency.  You'll search as you drink (RA rules: As long as the situation isn't "high risk," let kids drink), have sex (RA rules: Just make sure you have a condom, and try not to go asking for the morning-after pill too often), and study (RA rules: Weekly study break.  Go.).

And you'll never find that thing.  It breaks my heart.  The whole spectacle reminds me of Yeats' "The Second Coming"... "Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer; / Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."  Why don't we hear the falconer?  Jesus isn't a thing--He's a person.


"The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation.  For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him.  He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.  And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy.  For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross." - Colossians 1:15-20


If I have any hope of surviving this year, it's not going to be because of my RA training.  It's going to be by grace.