Threads

Last Friday, there was a dessert banquet for all the Montreat students who achieved the Dean's List and Distinguished Scholar. I had wondered what that "Distinguished Scholar" blurb meant at the bottom of my GPA summary. Apparently, it means any student with a GPA of 3.9 or higher. I'd gotten perfect grades in all my classes last semester, so of course I made the list. (Uh-oh. Where did I put those ego pins?)

At the banquet, Dottie Shuman gave a little speechy-thing on the integration of faith and learning at Montreat. I started to think about my own faith and learning experiences.

"All knowledge is interconnected," Brad Daniel said today in class. "We just organize it into groups for our own convenience." New Testament class goes with biology goes with English goes with history goes with environmental studies. Maybe it's just me, but I can see how everything I'm learning fits together. Sometimes I get mixed up about which class I learned something from. It seems just as likely to have come from Chaplain Steve's class as Dr. McCarthy's. It all just matches so well in my mind.

Faith is just one of the many continuous threads in my studies. In history, we examine how human nature and religions have led to the shaping of the world as we know it. We see how worldviews affect how people treat the environment. We study the spiritual veins in the literature we read. And, perhaps most of all, we marvel at the complexities of the human body. How can you read Pride and Prejudice and think the words fell into place by accident? No one claims that. How can you look at a tree or a cell and say it came about by chance? God has embroidered his authorship all over creation. If we ignore the title page and the writer confronts us about copyright, what can we say? We are without excuse. And so men are without excuse when they ignore the handwriting of God.