Faith & Work Conversation with Commerce School Dean Nicole Jenkins
The Faith & Work Forum is a series on Grounds that discusses the interplay between faith, work, and life. Each semester we feature guest speakers with leadership experience from across a wide range of vocations, who bring authentic stories about seeking a meaningful, purpose-driven life.
On Tuesday, February 15, 2022, our Spring 2022 Faith and Work Forum featured Nicole Thorne Jenkins, John A. Griffin Dean of the McIntire School of Commerce at the University of Virginia. She was introduced and interviewed by Diamond Walton, UVa alumna and Program Associate at the Tipping Point Fund. Watch the conversation below.
Some blessings for when you're at your rope's end | February 2022
GREETINGS, FRIENDS!
January felt like a difficult month to get our traction around here. Perhaps you felt it too. As we enter into a new month, let's give ourselves permission to be honest about our griefs and limitations. Let these words from Scripture and the blessing from author Kate Bowler be a balm over those sore places.
Christy Yates, Associate Director
“You’re blessed when you’re at the end of your rope. With less of you there is more of God and his rule. You’re blessed when you feel you’ve lost what is most dear to you. Only then can you be embraced by the One most dear to you. You’re blessed when you’re content with just who you are—no more, no less. That’s the moment you find yourselves proud owners of everything that can’t be bought." - Matthew 5:3-5, The Message
a blessing when you realize everyone is struggling - Kate Bowler
blessed are you who have realized that life is hard. and it’s hard for everyone. your awareness came at a cost. you lost something you can’t get back. you were diagnosed with chronic pain or a degenerative disease. your family fell apart and things have never been the same.
blessed are you who gave up the myth that the good life is one of happiness, success, perfection. the life that looks beautiful on Facebook, but isn’t real. you who realize it is okay to not be okay. To not have a shiny life, because no one does.
blessed are you who see things clearly, where struggle is everyone’s normal. you walk among the fellowship of the afflicted, a club no one wants to join.
and while this life isn’t shiny, it does come with superpowers. superpowers of ever-widening empathy and existential courage that get you back up after another fall
and a deepened awe at the beauty and love that can be found amid life’s rubble. like flowers that grow from the cracks in the sidewalk. these virtues blossom in you. and thank God for you.
blessed are all of us who struggle, for we are in good company, and we’ll never walk alone.
Cover image: “Be Astonished.” 48 x 60 in. Oil on canvas. Christen Yates
Reflections on faith & life from the road by Drew Rollins '21
Should you ever find yourself agaze, maybe full of yearning (if you’re anything like me), from the particular window at which I’m currently seated, try letting your eyes unfocus for a minute. Treat it like an optical illusion. Before you, the panorama’s color palette becomes blurred and stratified; fine details of creation retreat temporarily; it all starts to look like a Rothko painting—grey-white on blue on starkest white, slate on earth-brown on perseverant green.
I’m writing from a funny little bookstore/cafe in Boulder, Colorado, the rear casement of which looks out onto a grand expanse of wild, (to me heretofore) unfamiliar American terrain. Jagged, snowy peaks reach heavenward like a semicircle of greedy siblings competing to dominate the cornflower horizon. A narrow brook, presumably condescending from one such peak, trickles downwards, nurturing the adjacent foliage, slow but indefatigable, as though in search of something. I wonder where its contents will end up. Does it replenish some groundwater basin, or feed into the Platte or the Arkansas or the Yampa? Will the Pacific swell, just a bit, from its near imperceptible contribution?
A few weeks ago, I requested to take a hiatus from work and headed west in a gold pick-up truck that’s older than me. The expedition’s primary objectives: to visit friends, to write a lot, and to connect more deeply with (among other things) nature, myself, and my faith. I’m not sure how successful I’ve been thus far, and there are moments when that uncertainty distresses me—at what point will the life-altering enlightenment strike, ya know? In the past couple days, though, two verses have in tandem provided some measure of solace. One is an Old Testament charge: “Look to the Lord and His strength; seek His face always” (1 Chronicles 16:11). And the other is a New Testament complement: “No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and His love is perfected in us” (1 John 4:12).
The second verse mollifies the fear that a faith without dramatic discoveries or epiphanic visions is a faith without substance. For me, there is comfort in the notion of a Spirit that indwells us and enables us to love others well, even when said Spirit (or its role in the trajectory of our lives) is difficult to catch a glimpse of. Meanwhile, the first verse reiterates the value of continuing to search, in spite of—or perhaps even because of—those eras of rudderlessness that seem intrinsic to existence. We are meant to keep looking for God/struggling towards betterment/seeking that which we cannot see. In addition to whatever dividends it pays, I think there’s a sort of strange, paradoxical beauty in a quest like that, as nebulous as it can feel. The earth doesn’t need to shatter, and the ground doesn’t have to break. Faith endures and embraces doubt; it hinges on more than constant surety.
I want to be so undeterred. I want to keep combing the mountainside for inspiration and truth. I want to really believe that humans—like the peaks I’m surveying, born of old plate tectonics, violent collisions, and hard cataclysms, weathered by persistently erosive winds—are topographic creatures; that we’re shaped by what we experience, burnished by what we cherish, smoothed over by what we withstand. I want to be secure in uncertainty, to treasure the growth it fosters. I want love to flow from me, unremitting and forceful, even when I can’t quite envision its ultimate destination.
Epiphany | Stars
“IN THE TIME OF KING HEROD, AFTER JESUS WAS BORN IN BETHLEHEM OF JUDEA, WISE MEN FROM THE EAST CAME TO JERUSALEM, ASKING, ‘WHERE IS THE CHILD WHO HAS BEEN BORN KING OF THE JEWS? FOR WE OBSERVED HIS STAR AT ITS RISING, AND HAVE COME TO PAY HIM HOMAGE.”
MATTHEW 1:1-2
Noticing stars, for most of us, requires intention. To see stars, we must venture out into the night and look up. Epiphany reminds us that it is in dwelling in deep darkness and in gazing out into the vastness of space that we find the star that leads us to Jesus. Finding Jesus calls on us to step into unfamiliar night places and dare to look beyond the few feet ahead of us, to expand our purview and our risk-taking for Christ.
The coming of the three kings from far-away places --- whose pilgrimage led them long, hazardous distances through the dark, ever looking up and following a star --- calls us, the present day Jesus-followers, to question our inclinations to remain safe and live small. Discovering Jesus, being found by Jesus, moves us to go out, to see beauty where we never noticed it before, to be unafraid, to linger in the dark. Epiphany invites us to think and act expansively and with trust, to consider not only our immediate circumstances and circles, but the concerns of the whole of creation Jesus came to redeem.
FOR REFLECTION
When have you struggled to look up and out? What keeps you from venturing out in search of Jesus?
When have you been struck by the beauty of the night sky? Might you go outside and stargaze tonight? Ask yourself: What do I think and feel?
Where might your search for Jesus take you in this new year?
Lord of sea and sky, you create the earth and all that is within it, the moon and stars, the sun and clouds; no place is off-limits to your goodness. As we reflect on those strangers who came from far away to find Jesus, we rejoice that we know and worship him, too. When we become fixated on ourselves and the short distance ahead, move us to go out and look up, to remember you are the Lord of all and that when we seek you, we will find you. Amen.