It's Official

One nice thing about working for a campus ministry at Virginia Tech is that you get the hook up from the university. A great example of this is the fact that we get Long-Term Visitor parking passes. This means we can park in any spot on campus - Resident, Commuter, or Faculty/Staff. And it's free. Living right across the street from campus makes this not as big of a deal for April and me, but I'm going to use the pass at least once just because I remember how difficult the parking situation could be when I was a student.

We also got these today:


Somehow, this seems to make everything that we're doing a little more official. It's just so obvious now that I work in Campus Ministry.

It's funny because I was thinking about this idea when I was reading my Bible this morning. I was reading a story where Jesus was hungry, so he approached a fig tree that looked from a distance like it should have had some figs on it. Unfortunately, when he reached it, he realized that it had no fruit. Jesus said to the tree, "May no one ever eat fruit from you again." Later, Jesus and the disciples walked back by the tree and it was withered and dead.

Getting my Campus Ministry ID card made me think about this again, because I fear being like that fig tree. It showed me a picture of somebody who looks like they're living the kind of life God would appreciate from a distance. However, I want my life to bear real fruit - the kind that stands up to Jesus' close inspection. The kind that remains when all of those external things are stripped away from me. I can flash my new ID all I want, but God is not impressed with such things; in fact, Jesus calls the people he runs into who do these sorts of things hypocrites.

So I asked myself, what is this fruit? I think there are a lot of answers to that question, but the ones that I thought of this morning were the "fruit of the spirit" (love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control). I thought of a life that is lived in service to others. I thought of a life that shares the love of God freely and does not discriminate. I thought of a life that loves Jesus and is satisfied in him alone. I hope these are the things that Jesus sees when he gets close to my life.