noah

today, we had our game/fun/study night.
i spent the majority of the night talking with a grad student named noah.

noah is a grad student who "sporadically" attends grad iv and accidentally came to our study night.
rachel graciously allowed him to stay and hang out with us if he was interested.

what started out as an over-friendly vibe quickly turned into noah sucking his victim into a vacuum of noah-time. initially, we took turns 'saving eachother' from noah. noah would talk over people about almost anything, trying to prove that he knew a lot, no matter what the subject was.

i saw rachel and john trying to study in the corner so i thought that i should take over a noah-shift. i sat down and was immediately sucked into noah-time, since he saw that i was giving him my full attention.

what i had hoped would be 10 minutes quickly became the entire night. in the beginning, i was very arrogant and even annoyed. a lot of times i thought about just cutting him off and politely asking him to leave. but, at one point, i realized that God had orchestrated the fact that noah stumbled into our chapter, was desperately seeking someone to talk to, and in that very moment, that person was me.

so i did something that i don't do very often. i listened.

and i listened. i listened while he talked about the differences in theological divides and what he believed. as he stumbled over his own words i could see that he was very passionate and well-meaning, but ultimately he didn't actually know as much as he feigned. (a lot thanks to my current book, know what you believe. thanks calvin, didn't know it would come in so handy until tonight.)

and i fought (with a civil, academic tone) about some things that he wasn't expressing too well. and i waited and let him ramble into more cognitive phrases.

but then, something happened. and after all of these insane intellectual and academic barricades, noah emerged. he talked very vulnerably, and told me how he had been very hurt this past month. apparently, he had been having similar conversations / debates with his more liberal friends (noah is episcopalian) which he thought were civil. and with a very close friend, he ended the conversation saying "i know we have a lot of differences and we disagree about a lot of things, but i still want to be friends." and his friend responded, "noah, i don't want to talk to you anymore."

so behind all of this crap that was spewing out of his mouth, noah was hiding a person who had been hurt deeply and recently. and if i had just shoved him out or tuned him out, he would still be disconnected and immensely hurt.

so tonight, God taught me something i'm not very good at - to be patient. and He showed me tonight that beyond exteriors, people are essentially the same and they really do need love. christian or not.

i feel very humbled and ashamed about my initial reactions to noah.
and though i didn't run around playing super smash tonight, i think God used this opportunity and this time to teach me something that can only be learned in practice.

so i'm very thankful that noah stumbled into aaiv tonight and that he shared some of his life with me.

i realize that this is not what this blog is for ... but this is the strongest lesson that i've learned from God this week. iron sharpens iron, and we can all learn something from each other.