The Same Hand

The Same Hand

Nearly thirty years after my undergrad days, I again carry in my pocketbook a student ID. The back window of my car, much to my oldest niece’s amusement, sports a student parking permit. I’m in school again, pursuing a hybrid master’s degree in the disciplines I loved most as an undergrad: literature, theology, history, and philosophy.

Aside from the time demands graduate school makes on an already-full schedule, I love it. And I’m discovering that the undergrad who was content with a long string of Bs and a few As and Cs is no longer satisfied with any letter but A.

What I’m finding most delicious about school this time around is the way my faith informs every bit of my learning. If those four long-ago years at a state university were my first spiritual renaissance, this chapter of academic life is my second. Then I was learning to test a ten-year-old faith for its practical veracity, and it proved truer than true. Now I carry within me a relationship more than four decades old, and it doesn’t just inform my own experiences, it also informs every ounce of literature, art, history, and philosophy I am exploring.

And I shouldn’t be surprised. As John Owen wrote, “The same hand which laid this foundation, doth also finish the building.”^a (This time around, I knew enough to check Owen out of the library for fun—not because he was assigned reading!)

The same hand that laid the foundation is the hand that is finishing, and will one day completely finish, the building. The building of one individual follower (me), of every other follower, and of his great church.

Some things have changed. My classmates have dreadlocks and soul patches. A few have gray hair and soul. But one thing stays the same: the hand that laid the foundation will doubtless finish the building. And what a beautiful hand it is.

No one can lay a foundation other than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ.

1 Corinthians 3:11, ESV

^a John Owen, A Treatise on the Holy Spirit and His Operations (Xenia, OH: Board of the Calvinistic Book Concern, 1841), 102.