While reading this afternoon, I found a passage in L'Engle's Walking on Water that expresses one of the main lessons I learned during my time in Oxford:
In a very real sense not one of us is qualified, but it seems that God continually chooses the most unqualified to do his work, to bear his glory. If we are qualified, we tend to think that we have done the job ourselves. If we are forced to accept our evident lack of qualification, then there's no danger that we will confuse God's work with our own, or God's glory with our own. (p. 62)
My time in Oxford taught me one thing: I am not qualified. As I am, I am not adequate. I frequently experience this feeling, but in Oxford it was intensified. I felt it in almost every conversation. In eavesdropping on the people walking the streets with me. In reading my papers aloud to Dr. P. In comparison to others in the program who evidently hold a deeper passion for the Lord than I do.
But this intense experience of inadequacy was good for me. It served as a reminder that any success I may find, any knowledge I can claim, any skill or talent I might possess, is not my own. It comes from someone greater than me; I am only enabled to do, or know, or achieve.
As I stood outside the door to our tutorial room, waiting to go in to my second tutorial with Dr. P., I felt discouraged. After my last tutorial I had felt like crying. This second essay I wrote seemed even worse than the first. I leaned against the wall and envisioned my GPA sinking ever lower. But then a question drifted through my mind: Why am I here, in Oxford? What do I want to get out of this experience? Is my time here only about sustaining my GPA or is there something more? No, I thought, I want more from this. I want to grow in understanding, I want to learn -- about myself, about others, about God. Right before I went in, I handed the upcoming hour to the Lord and asked him to teach me what he would, to make it not a time where I could impress Dr. P (because there was no way I could!), but a time where I would learn and reach a higher level of understanding.
Would you believe we had a fantastic tutorial? We most certainly did. I felt I learned so much about myself and about God in that hour, through our conversation, and even -- or perhaps, especially -- through my inadequacies and my questions.
And it moved my heart to praise. As I walked back along St. Giles and Banbury, the only words flowing in my spirit were thank you. The paradox of realizing one's unqualified nature, as L'Engle points out so adeptly, is that it points us to the one who is qualified. As we realize our limitations, our failures, our inadequacy, we need not be discouraged; we can be encouraged in the glory and wonder of seeing God display his adequacy, his involvement in all aspects of life, his boundless ability.
Thanks be to God.
(photo: stained glass in Holy Trinity Church, Coventry)
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