Trying to follow

A friend of mine asked me to reflect on my time at Wheaton and expressed a little about what I have learned from my time there. Rather then bring up a number of unrelated things in one post I thought I would just post as the reasons and situations come to mind.
I had the great opportunity to met with the Chaplain at Wheaton for an exit interview in the spring of my senior year. At gave me a chance to reflect on the good and bad of my time and I came up with a handful of things that I thought where the most wide spread, not necessarily just specific to my personal experience. The one I had the hardest time explaining is the one I’ll start with: The lifestyle of Wheaton College instills underlying assumptions that keep us from following Christ fully.

When I first got to Wheaton I thoroughly enjoyed the nice big dorm rooms, the fancy Lego-like furniture; I loved the food at the cafeteria and the fact that people cleaned up after me everywhere I went. I enjoyed seeing the flowers planted around campus and the nice architecture. The Student Rec Center was state-of-the-art and the classrooms had all the technology needs you could imagine. I enjoyed all of these things, and I justified in my mind that during my time of diligent studies it was nice to be in a comfortable environment with everything taken care of. Sophomore year, a campaign to build a $20 million student center began, and I suddenly realized the great tragedy of having all we had at Wheaton.

You see, when you sit in a “Christian” Institution, listening to a “Christian” teacher, amongst “Christian” peers, you have an immediate assumption that the Lifestyle, the buildings, the spending being done in your community is therefore “Christian.” But that is not necessarily true.

When you sit in the coffee shop of an extravagant student center and read Jesus words about caring for the poor, it is hard to acknowledge that your fancy community might be in conflict with really carrying that out.

I fear too many students have left Wheaton with this assumption: I can buy a big house, an expensive car, fancy clothes and furniture, take exotic vacations, live the high society life, AND still follow Christ call to take up their cross and follow him.

If you haven’t noticed the little orange badge in the bottom right corner of my blog (and from the stats, most of you have) I’m a fan of Firefox over IE. There are multiple reasons, but I’m through trying to persuade you to switch, I’d rather tell you about some of the great things I use at firefox.
I recently had to start my computer back up from scratch, which has meant restarting my firefox installation. Before I had added so many extensions that they were conflicting with one another and freezing up firefox at least once a day. I couldn’t bear to part with them though so I left it in conflict and just got used to restarting.
But, now I’m starting from scratch and I’ve decided to move quite slowly and only install my absolute favorite extensions, one at a time. So for those who have just entered the firefox extension world here are my current Must-Haves:

1. TabMixPlus- This is my first install because of a couple of the great features:
   -undo (restores tabs you closed right back to their original position with their history intacted)
   -Session Manager (restores all your tabs from the last time you closed Firefox, let’s me pick up right where I left off)
2. Google Toolbar- They greatest feature currently is that you can pick and choose which buttons to add to where on your toolbars:
   -Autofill (saves hours of time filling out forms)
   -Spellcheck (keeps me from looking like an idiot)
3. Greasemonkey- I wish I could explain how cool this is, but the list is endless. If you ever thought a site would be cooler if… there is probably a script for it.

And these two are more specific to your situation and interest:
1. FireFTP: for those who do webdesign easy upload
2. Screengrab: if you like to take full length screen shots of webpages

At the recommendation of a friend I picked up Maya Angelou’s Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now and I promptly read it in a day. Each short essay brought a new thought and insight which I was quite grateful for. I think I might expound on some of these at a later date but for now I wanted to give you a couple of short glimpses into some of the essays, maybe to wet your appetite and encourage you to pick it up from your local library.

“While I know myself as a creation of God, I am also obligated to realize and remember that everyone else and everything else are also God’s creation. This is particularly difficult for me when my mind falls upon the cruel person, the batterer, and the bigot. I would like to think that the mean-spirited were created by another force and under the aegis and direction of something other than my God. But since I believe that God created all things, I am not only constrained to know that the oppressor is a child of God, but also obliged to try to treat him or her as a child of God.”

“There are a few misguided wits who think they are being complimentary when they declare a woman is “too much”. While it is admirable and desirable to be enough, only masochists want to be “too much.”…A certain amount of paranoia is essential in the oppressed or in any likely targets of oppressors.”

“The woman who survives intact and happy must be at once tender and tough. She must have convinced herself, or be in the unending process of convincing herself, that she, her values, and her choices are important. In a time and world where males hold sway and control, the pressure upon women to yield their rights-of-way is tremendous. And it is under those very circumstances that the woman’s toughness must be in evidence.
She must resist considering herself a lesser version of her male counterpart. She is not a sculptress, poetess, Jewess, Negress, or even (now rare) in university parlance a rectoress. If she is the thing, than for her own sense of self and for the education of the ill-informed she must insist with rectitude in being the thing and in being called the thing. ”

“We need to have the courage to say obesity is not funny, vulgarity is not amusing, insolent children and submissive parents are not the characters we want to admire and emulate. Flippancy and sarcasm are not the only ways in which conversation can be conducted.
If the emperor is standing in my living room stripped to the buff, nothing should prevent me from saying that since he has no clothes on, he is not ready for public congress.
At any rate, not lounging on my sofa and munching on my trail mix.”

I know there is probably a good explanation of this, I’m just wondering what it is.

Financial Lesson #1: Discerning your Needs and Wants

I told you my financial wisdom would not be overly complicated or deep, and lesson #1 is no exception. You must sit down (and if you are married, you both need to sit down) and draw up a list of your basic NEEDS (That you spend money on). To make this easy, do not start with what you see in and around your house, start with what you will be purchasing from this point forward. As an example person myself, here is an example.

Jack and Jill sit down and start their list of NEEDS. Immediately the basics come to mind: Food and Shelter. They break shelter down into clothes and rent (including heat, electricity etc). Now to get the money to purchase food they would need an income, thus their jobs. And to keep their job they each need transportation to work and occasionally work appropriate clothing. Jill thought back to here psychology days and Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and suggested they did have some ‘emotional’ needs that might be hard to countify. In the end they came up with these needs: FOOD, SHELTER, TRANSPORTATION, MISC (Clothing, soap, etc) and EMOTIONAL.

But, that’s not the end of the lesson. Things get a little more complicated at this point. Does “Food” mean eating out three times a week and coffee at Bongo Java every morning? Are those NEEDS? You must discern on your own what part of your “food” is meeting your basic needs and what part is fulfilling your WANTS. The same goes for clothing. You might NEED button down shirts and dressy shoes for on the job, but you don’t NEED name brand clothing to wear out on the town. Getting to work is a Transportation NEED, driving across town to the outlet mall is not. Does that make some sense?

As you think through your needs, be sure to write down the things you’ve discerned are WANTS in another column (eating out, coffee, shopping trips, new sweaters).

Your Assignment for this week: Spend money as you normally have in the past, but be very concious of how much you are spending on Needs and how much on WANTS. Keep track of actual purchases if you’d like. And see if thinking through these lists actually changes what you spend money on through out the week.

…Lesson #2: Giving