的 蓝色的论坛 is your place to learn about all things Covenant and keep up with stories from campus and beyond. By guiding you through the different aspects of Covenant, we'll help you decide if you want to pursue your very own Covenant experience.
一位刚毕业的学生说：路易莎·蒙泰罗-奥利维拉25岁
In this time of farewells and beginnings, I've been dwelling a lot on theologians Francis and Edith Schaeffer’s major and minor themes for the Christian worldview. 的 minor theme is that all of creation has turned away from God, and no matter how hard we try, we will always live in an extremely broken world alongside extremely broken people inhabiting extremely broken bodies. Many of us are going on to enter into various humanitarian fields. 为此赞美上帝。 But knowing the minor theme is knowing that no matter how much progress is made, it will never be enough to undo all of the brokenness.
的 major theme, on the other hand, is that though we turn away from God, God refuses to turn away from us. 上帝的存在。 God is glorious beyond our comprehension, and God created the world. 所以世界是光荣的。 我们是光荣的。 And life is not insignificant. This isn’t really new to us—week one Christian Mind course—but what is striking to me isn't that these themes exist, but how game-changing they are in teaching people to understand better how to be good artists.
基督教艺术家的主要或次要主题
Ignoring the minor themes in art makes for art that slaps a Spider-Man bandaid on the amputated wound of God's people. But art without the major themes drowns people in hopelessness. It doesn’t point people toward God—because either people think that God doesn’t exist, or He exists but He’s too far above us irredeemable scum for it to mean anything.
So though every work of art doesn't have to hold both themes exactly and equally, over the course of an artist's life, their portfolio ought to reflect both of those truths. Some of God's portfolio pieces include the stories that He tells through our lives.
克服障碍，发现不应得的恩典
回想我在威尼斯人平台的时光，我看到了这些主要和次要的主题。 的 fact that I'm standing on this stage right now is miraculous. And if you're one of those people who helped drag me across the finish line—you know. I arrived here a profoundly struggling freshman. 的re were wounds I knew I needed to work on, and there were wounds I didn’t know even existed.
I thought, however, that by my senior year at the latest, if I was a good Christian girl, said my prayers, and tried really hard, I would be an easy-to-work-with, Dean’s List student who astonished everyone by how she overcame all the hurdles she came in with.
Well, I worked on myself, I prayed, I fought really, really hard—and I am not even close to overcoming all the things that I need to. I could do a year-long sermon series on all the times the mercy of my professors rescued me—both from situations entirely of my own doing and entirely out of my control.
Me graduating is so much more a testament to my one-of-a-kind, forbearing, godly community than it is of anything I ever did. And somehow, there's nothing more fitting than this. Just as I didn’t deserve all of the grace my professors extended again and again and again, we don’t deserve the ways that God pursues us when we continually do things that break His heart—after promising Him, “Oh, I’ve learned. Next time I’ll do better, Jesus. 我不会再这样做了。” 但值得从来都不是重点。 我们不顺服神； 因此，我们是他的形象有价值的承载者。 我们是他的形象的有价值的承载； therefore we obey God.
一个美丽、愚蠢和爱的世界
A triumphant Covenant ending might have fed into my ego—it might have created a good American success story. 但是美国的成功故事并不是上帝的成功故事。 上帝的故事没有意义。 但为什么我们需要让它有意义呢？ Why shouldn’t the gratitude towards the people who got me here today outweigh any of the shame that I have, that I didn’t get here the way that I wanted to? 的re have been so many incredibly healing stories over these past four years. You all have loved me in ways I didn’t know to even ask for, and I’ve discovered that this world is filled with so much more beauty, so much more silliness, than I ever knew.
But when I think about what Covenant has given to me that I would like to give to anyone who needs it, it’s an understanding that our stories may be beautiful, and it may never be because we got our crap together and earned it. Every day will be a repetition of sinning, repenting, growing closer to God, and realizing more things that we have to repent of—and sinning again, sometimes in the exact same way as before.
Should our stories be worth telling someday, it will be because Jesus loves us better than we love ourselves and will not abandon His sheep in their vulnerability. No matter what happens from here on out—how much we accomplish, don’t accomplish—we cannot despair, because this is God’s show, and we just get to be cast in it!
So to end us off, I would like to recite the first verse of one of my favorite hymns that I cling to in this time, and I hope that it will give you comfort:
“啊，爱，你不放我走，
我疲倦的灵魂在你那里安息。
我把我欠你的生命还给你，
在你的海洋深处流淌
愿你更富有，更圆满。”