Redefinition.
“I want to keep walking away from the person I was a moment ago, because a mind was made to figure things out, not to read the same page recurrently.”
I grew up thinking that I was stupid.
As early as elementary school, I remember sitting in class and staring at the whiteboard while every other head was nodding in class. I just didn’t get it. It was almost as if I had been blindfolded, transported to a different country, and then forced to sit through logic problems. Math was particularly hard for me—my mind just couldn’t wrap itself around the equations and principles. While other kids were whizzing through their homework within an hour, I often found myself with a blank sheet of paper and a thousand prayers hoping that the teacher wouldn’t call on me. (I must have been very good at prayer. I was not called on very often.)
And this carried over for a while. Years, in fact.
I ended up repeating a couple of classes in high school. What’s most embarrassing about repeating classes is trying to explain the situation in a casual, cool way to your friends. (“I just love learning the same subjects multiple times, you know?”) And even on the second try at a class, I would barely pass. It was a wonder that I even graduated high school, and practically a miracle that I got into college.
During my first year at my college, I made a promise to myself that I would try to become the student I never was in high school. So I became very ambitious, signing up for complicated classes such as “Introduction to Legal Studies” and “Classical Greek Mythology,” all of them scheduled for the dreaded 8:00AM slot—which I mysteriously and uncharacteristically overlooked—and my third class at college was a required campus-specific course that had to do with gender and racial issues and mainly discussion based. And early on I had the incredible foresight, after the first week, that I had made a terrible mistake with my enrollment choices.
So I immediately made the first two classes pass/fail.
On the last week of the quarter, my professor for the third campus-specific course scheduled an appointment with me as our ‘final’ assignment. When I walked in and sat down, she leaned back thoughtfully and asked me what I had gotten out of the class.
So I talked about our discussions—I talked about how the class had widened my perspective on racial issues, how it brought an immediate awareness to disparities in the world, how even my view on my classmates had changed through our ten weeks together. (This was all true, by the way.) The whole time she’s nodding and writing on her notepad while I’m talking, and at the end she puts the notepad down and says, “You know, before you walked in, I was prepared to give you a C+ for the past quarter based on your assignments. But now, after this conversation, I think I’ll give you a B.”
My heart soared.
Two weeks after the quarter ended, I checked my grades.
My professor must have had another change of heart, because I now had an A.
And because I had made the other two classes pass/fail, I had inadvertently achieved a 4.0.
It’s hard to describe the feeling that this achievement—however contrived it was—had on me. I walked out of my room with a newfound confidence and boldness, told my mother I had achieved a 4.0 (for the first time in my life!) and walked back into the room with this odd but exhilarating feeling: I was not stupid.
From that point onwards, I don’t know if I ever thought of myself as stupid ever again.
I love that the first two disciples Jesus asks to follow him are fishermen.
Fishermen are men who fish.
If you were a fisherman at the time of Jesus, that meant that very early on in your adolescence, you didn't make the cut to study under a rabbi and you were sent back home to continue the family trade. And that meant only the best and the brightest Jewish students got to study under the tutelage of a rabbi, following them while the rabbis taught and explained and acted and walked around and fell asleep on boats (does this sound familiar?) while the rest had to return home to become laborers or farmers or fishermen. I imagine they must have, at times, felt envious of these students who followed around the rabbis when they passed by—perhaps even a little bit stupid.
And yet, this new rabbi named Jesus, out of nowhere, invites them into the process of discipleship and tells them that if they follow him, he will make them "fishers of men." Not fishermen. Fishers of men. He's giving them a new identity, even though nothing about their personhood or situation has changed. And they drop everything in that instant to go follow him—and in doing so, embark on the adventure of a lifetime.
God has this way of taking the same person,
Living in the same situation,
And in an instant, with a few words,
Even if the person hasn't changed,
And the situation hasn't changed,
Give them a glimpse of who they were meant to be,
And in doing so, this same person, in the same situation,
Experiences a change in the way they think,
Experiences a change in the way they act,
And life is different.