College girl writes a song

"See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the basic principles of this world rather than on Christ." -  COLOSSIANS 2:8 (niv) 

My second semester in college, I signed up for a cultural anthropology course - one that I knew going in was taught by a professor who did not believe in God... and who was in fact vehemently determined to change the mind of any student of his that did.  After hearing way too many stories of Christians-turned-atheists after such classroom experiences, my mom was pretty worried about me taking the class and hoped I would just find a suitable alternative route for earning my social science credit - which I could have done.  But at 21 years old, having spent the first 19 years of my life meeting, getting to know, and committing myself to a God I'd known as real and having devoted the most recent 2 years of my life at a Bible school where I studied and served full time FOR that God, I wanted to believe that my faith wasn't something that I could simply be talked out of.  I needed to know what I believed.  So I stayed in the class.

I did pray before the start of the semester though and very sincerely in my apartment bedroom asked God to stay real to me.  I told Him how much I loved Him, how much I had loved knowing Him in my life, and asked Him to help me to see and hear only the truth.

 

An amazing thing happened that semester as I attended that hour-and-fifteen-minute class twice a week in the Evans Liberal Arts building of the Texas State campus, jotting down pages of notes from each passionate and many times abrasive lecture and watching as, one-by-one, the few God-fearing classmates I had were publicly humiliated and ultimately quieted by my oh-so-condescending professor throughout the semester:  my heart broke for him.  And for the majority of other students sitting in that classroom next to me who made it clear that they shared the views of this very intelligent and accomplished man.  My heart broke for him and for them because it became clear through their bitter rants and hateful jabs that they had obviously never gotten to meet the God that I had.  They had never known what it felt like to be comforted by Him when nothing else could bring that comfort... or experienced His unexplainable joy in the middle of a time that only otherwise would have been hopeless...  or  gotten to live even one day feeling the true peace and wholeness that only comes through salvation.

That semester, God gave me the song that you can hear below.   The first line says "If all else were true, wouldn't change my mind...".   I still can't explain or understand all the science of the universe or just the right argument to each of Professor X's questions ~ But I have come to the place where that doesn't even matter.  A friend of my mother's when I was growing up said, "A person with an argument is always at the mercy of a person with an experience."  And I am a person with an experience.  I have experienced too much of
God and His real-ness to ever question whether He is real.  I have experienced real healing and real change and watched real transformation in the lives of others right before my very eyes - and for that I am grateful to God and can only pray and hope that Professor X and the other students I studied alongside that semester will someday also get to experience the love and grace of that same God.  Because whether they know it or not now, they too were made by Him.

Click here to listen: "I was made by You, made only for You - Jesus, I am Yours"
(Spring 2004)