my measuring stick

i spent yesterday in chapel hill.

i also spent 4 years of my life there.

when i go back, i'm often a little pensive. i like to think about how i'm a different person now than when i was there. and i don't mean different person in that i have a husband now and i didn't then. i mean different person in the sense of how i have grown in the grace of the gospel.

my time in chapel hill shaped a lot of the person i am now. it was there that i first looked around, saw a bunch of people who didn't claim to be christians (and, in fact, were probably atheists) caring for others around them (read: LOVING PEOPLE), and wondered what my christian faith really had to say about injustice on earth. i started reading the gospels constantly. i wondered why the majority of christians i knew -- including me -- were mostly caught up in moralism. i wondered why nobody -- including me -- seemed to actually give a damn (sorry, but it's really the best word) about the fact that people suffer now and need a gospel that is about more than the afterlife. and i wondered why so few christians i knew didn't believe in justice work even though that's all jesus ever did.

and so it was there, in chapel hill, that the gospel was enlarged for me. redemption became a bigger, more all-encompassing reality. my life didn't start looking different until much later, but that's where it all began. when i go back, i like to ask myself if i'm still becoming a different person. if ever i can't say that my life looks different than the last time i was there, i have a problem.