Chi Alpha @ Stanford

Almost every prayer request I’ve received so far men­tions anx­i­ety about room­mates, so I thought I should offer some thoughts on the subject.

I’ve had over thirty room­mates in my edu­ca­tional career. They’ve ranged from sem­i­nary stu­dents to drug deal­ers, and I even woke up one morn­ing to find an unknown neo-nazi sleep­ing in my roommate’s bed!

In other words, I speak with expe­ri­ence when it comes to room­mates, and the best piece of advice I can give you is this: the way to have a great room­mate is to be a great roommate.

1. For­bear­ance should be your watch­word. If you don’t know what it means, look it up!
2. Be real­is­tic. You’re not guar­an­teed to become best friends with your room­mate. In fact, that’s kind of rare. Usu­ally you get a good friend who’s just on the bor­der of your inner cir­cle, and some­times you sim­ply live in the same room and respect one another. Just accept what­ever comes in that department.
3. Talk frankly about your expec­ta­tions. If you don’t want your room­mate ever touch­ing your stuff, tell them! Be sure to phrase it in a dis­arm­ing way, “Lis­ten, I’m just a lit­tle funny about my stuff. Please don’t touch any of it with­out ask­ing me first.” Also, don’t make that the first thing you say to them. They’re just as ner­vous as you are, and you don’t want to be the roo­mate they had night­mares about!
4. Never ignore con­flict. If you fail to address irri­ta­tion it grows to frus­tra­tion, then to anger, and then to full-blown ani­mos­ity and resent­ment. A year is a long time to seep in bitterness–don’t let it hap­pen to you.
5. Be sure to remem­ber these words of advice from God: If you shout a pleas­ant greet­ing to your neigh­bor too early in the morn­ing, it will be counted as a curse! (Proverbs 27:14, NLT) Be sure to respect your roommate’s sleep time. Remember–that one’s from God Himself!
6. And the most rel­e­vant piece of coun­sel in the whole Bible is the Golden Rule: Do for oth­ers what you would like them to do for you. (Matthew 7.12, NLT) Note that this is a com­mand to engage in good behav­ior, not sim­ply to avoid neg­a­tive stuff. Be proac­tive in treat­ing your room­mate right!

Fol­low the above advice, and you’ll do just fine.

But Sup­pose My Room­mate Isn’t a Chris­t­ian?
What a won­der­ful chance to emu­late Jesus; after all, Christ was known as a friend of sin­ners! How­ever, if you do have a room­mate who isn’t serv­ing Jesus be sure to seek out a net­work of peers who will bol­ster your faith.

In fact, let me take a moment to strongly encour­age you to find a Chris­t­ian group on cam­pus that you click with. I’d be thrilled if you chose Chi Alpha, but my prime con­cern is that you find some­place that will nur­ture your faith. Make find­ing a Chris­t­ian com­mu­nity a top pri­or­ity: Satan feeds off strays!

P.S. If you found this help­ful, you might also want to check out Stan­ford sopho­more Andrew Wright’s advice to fresh­men.

Hi–my name is Andrew Wright. As this is my first blog post­ing, I should tell you a lit­tle bit about myself. I’m a sopho­more major­ing in Inter­na­tional Rela­tions, and this year (2002) I’ll be a peer aca­d­e­mic advi­sor for eight lucky fresh­men in Rinconada!

See­ing that fresh­men will be arriv­ing on Thurs­day, I thought it appro­pri­ate that I throw out some tips for new students.

1) You won’t use half of what you bring! Most of those books you thought you’d bring to look smarter, will only col­lect dust. So will your 5 extra bath tow­els, 3 heavy jack­ets, and pos­si­bly even your stereo sys­tem (should you decide to pirate music on your com­puter). School sup­plies can be bought at fair prices from the book­store. Not only do you have stu­dent dis­count, fresh­men are enti­tled to an even larger dis­count on cer­tain impor­tant items. Not only are they cheap, but that have “Stan­ford” writ­ten all over them (literally)!

2) Present your­self as you truly are! Over-exuberance or first-week acts of folly can quickly lead to a rep­u­ta­tion or expec­ta­tions that you may find hard to live up to. Remem­ber, you have to live with your dor­m­mates for an entire year, so be your­self and you’ll have noth­ing to regret.

3) The pat­terns you set now will deter­mine who you become. Don’t neglect your devo­tional life because the more time that goes by, the eas­ier it will be for you to shrug it off. As Glen once said, “We’re defined by our habits, so choose yours carefully.”

4) Search thor­oughly, but plug into a Chris­t­ian group quickly. Imme­di­ately you’re going to be bom­barded with tons of dif­fer­ent philoso­phies, and if you don’t have a group to help you explore and rein­force your own you’ll be one con­fused fresh­man! Also, friend­ships and bonds within the group tend to form quickly. And the longer you wait to join a group, the greater the chance you’ll feel awk­ward when you visit the group.

If you have any ques­tions or con­trary opin­ions, just make a com­ment below.

This is basi­cally a tweaked, sug­ar­coated ver­sion of our pre­vi­ous arti­cle Famous Liv­ing Sci­en­tists Who Are Chris­tians. That arti­cle lists many more sci­en­tists and pro­vides links to source documentation.

Are Chris­tians Stu­pid?
Chris Carter (the cre­ator of the X-Files) once met with Penn & Teller (the funny magi­cians). Carter knew that Penn & Teller are very out­spo­ken athe­ists, so he asked them if any sci­en­tists believed in God.

They answered, �None of the impor­tant ones.�

That com­ment reflects a wide­spread assump­tion that smart peo­ple don�t believe in God, and they most cer­tainly don�t wor­ship Jesus as God.

In fact, maybe you�re wor­ried that they’re right�that once you come to Stan­ford you�ll learn some deep, dark secret that will tear your faith to shreds. Maybe you�re even wor­ried that you�ll be one of the only Chris­tians here.

There Are Lots of Smart Chris­tians
First, let me reas­sure you that you won�t be the only Chris­t­ian at Stan­ford this year. Some­where around 10% of the stu­dent body is involved in a Chris­t­ian cam­pus min­istry on a weekly basis.

So relax�you�re not alone. Many of your peers believe.

More­over, some of the great­est schol­ars in the world are devoted fol­low­ers of Jesus Christ. Whether you�re major­ing in the hard sci­ences, the social sci­ences, human­i­ties, or the arts there are believ­ers at the intel­lec­tual fore­front of your field.

Con­se­quently, I�d like to directly address the claim made by Penn & Teller that none of the �impor­tant� sci­en­tists believe in God.

Lots Of Impor­tant Sci­en­tists Believe In God
The eas­i­est way to rebut such a claim is to pro­duce a ver­i­fi­able list of impor­tant sci­en­tists will­ing to pub­licly affirm their belief in God, so we’ve done just that!

Here are some highlights:

Dr. Charles Towns is a Nobel lau­re­ate, invented the laser, and almost won a sec­ond Nobel for some cos­mo­log­i­cal work.

Dr. Henry Schae­fer is a Nobel nom­i­nee and the third-most quoted chemist in the world.

Dr. Allan Sandage is con­sid­ered to the world�s great­est obser­va­tional cos­mol­o­gist. The list of his awards would require a ridicu­lous amount of space.

Dr. Fran­cis Collins is the direc­tor of the Human Genome Project, the attempt to iden­tify every gene in human DNA.

These sound like pretty impor­tant sci­en­tists to me�what do you think?

It makes sense that these out­stand­ing sci­en­tists are believ­ers. Increas­ing our knowl­edge about the world should increase our under­stand­ing of God. As Paul says in Romans 1:20, �since the cre­ation of the world God’s invis­i­ble qualities–his eter­nal power and divine nature–have been clearly seen, being under­stood from what has been made��

May your time at Stan­ford lead you to a deeper knowl­edge of God as you gain a deeper knowl­edge of this world He has made!

Stan­ford University�wow! If you�re like most Chris­tians, you�re excited and ner­vous at the same time. You�re excited because Stan­ford is such a great school, but you�re ner­vous about what it will do to your faith. If that describes you, I encour­age you to med­i­tate on the story of Daniel.

When Baby­lon defeated Israel around 600 B.C., the Baby­lo­ni­ans took the chil­dren of the Israeli nobles to Baby­lon for reed­u­ca­tion (a pol­icy designed to ensure the future loy­alty of their cap­tured coun­tries), and so Daniel was taken to Baby­lon to undergo a three year course of stud­ies in Baby­lon­ian law, mythol­ogy, and cul­ture designed to pre­pare him for a career of pub­lic ser­vice. (Daniel 1:1–4)

Think about that: as a young adult he under­went a three year course of study designed to groom him for suc­cess in a spe­cific career. In other words, he was a stu­dent at the Uni­ver­sity of Baby­lon! Let�s exam­ine a few prin­ci­ples we can infer from their experiences:

Daniel remained true to his val­ues, even at per­sonal risk. (Daniel 1:8–16)

But Daniel resolved that he would not defile him­self with the royal rations of food and wine; so he asked the palace mas­ter to allow him not to defile him­self. Now God allowed Daniel to receive favor and com­pas­sion from the palace mas­ter. The palace mas­ter said to Daniel, �I am afraid of my lord the king; he has appointed your food and your drink. If he should see you in poorer con­di­tion than the other young men of your own age, you would endan­ger my head with the king.� Then Daniel asked the guard whom the palace mas­ter had appointed over Daniel, Hana­niah, Mishael, and Azariah: �Please test your ser­vants for ten days. Let us be given veg­eta­bles to eat and water to drink. You can then com­pare our appear­ance with the appear­ance of the young men who eat the royal rations, and deal with your ser­vants accord­ing to what you observe.� So he agreed to this pro­posal and tested them for ten days. At the end of ten days it was observed that they appeared bet­ter and fat­ter than all the young men who had been eat­ing the royal rations. So the guard con­tin­ued to with­draw their royal rations and the wine they were to drink, and gave them vegetables.

Daniel excelled at his stud­ies, even though he was study­ing pagan mate­ri­als. (Daniel 1:17–20)

To these four young men God gave knowl­edge and skill in every aspect of lit­er­a­ture and wis­dom; Daniel also had insight into all visions and dreams. At the end of the time that the king had set for them to be brought in, the palace mas­ter brought them into the pres­ence of Neb­uchad­nez­zar, and the king spoke with them. And among them all, no one was found to com­pare with Daniel, Hana­niah, Mishael, and Azariah; there­fore they were sta­tioned in the king�s court. In every mat­ter of wis­dom and under­stand­ing con­cern­ing which the king inquired of them, he found them ten times bet­ter than all the magi­cians and enchanters in his whole kingdom.

Daniel took risks for God, even where oth­ers had failed. (Daniel 2:12–19)

…the king flew into a vio­lent rage and com­manded that all the wise men of Baby­lon be destroyed. The decree was issued, and the wise men were about to be exe­cuted; and they looked for Daniel and his com­pan­ions, to exe­cute them. Then Daniel responded with pru­dence and dis­cre­tion to Ari­och, the king�s chief exe­cu­tioner, who had gone out to exe­cute the wise men of Baby­lon; he asked Ari­och, the royal offi­cial, �Why is the decree of the king so urgent?� Ari­och then explained the mat­ter to Daniel. So Daniel went in and requested that the king give him time and he would tell the king the inter­pre­ta­tion. Then Daniel went to his home and informed his com­pan­ions, Hana­niah, Mishael, and Azariah, and told them to seek mercy from the God of heaven con­cern­ing this mys­tery, so that Daniel and his com­pan­ions with the rest of the wise men of Baby­lon might not per­ish. Then the mys­tery was revealed to Daniel in a vision of the night, and Daniel blessed the God of heaven.

Resolve now that you will choose the course of Daniel dur­ing your time at Stan­ford! Med­i­tate on Daniel and the chal­lenges he faced, imag­ine what anal­o­gous sit­u­a­tions you might encounter at Stan­ford, and decide in advance how you will respond!

There are zil­lions of Chris­t­ian books out there, and many of them are worth­while reads. There are few, how­ever, that are truly out­stand­ing. Here are some that really need to appear on your read­ing list!

Grow­ing Spir­i­tu­ally:
1) The Spirit of the Dis­ci­plines, by Dal­las Willard (author, Ama­zon)
2) Prayer, by Richard Fos­ter (Ama­zon)
3) Life Together, by Diet­rich Bon­ho­ef­fer (Ama­zon)

Under­stand­ing the Bible:
1) The Chal­lenge of Jesus, by N.T. Wright (pub­lisher, Ama­zon)
2) Slaves, Women, and Homo­sex­u­als, by William Webb (pub­lisher, Ama­zon)
3) Sur­prised By The Power of the Spirit, by Jack Deere (author, Ama­zon)

Rea­son­able Answers to Hon­est Ques­tions
1) Mere Chris­tian­ity, by C. S. Lewis (author, Ama­zon)
2) Long Jour­ney Home, by Os Guin­ness (Ama­zon)