So I am presenting my senior thesis tomorrow and all. I was trying not to be nervous, but that didn’t really work, so now I’m at least trying to be prepared. There have been a bunch of people appearing in my life who have been helping me prepare in one way or another.

Like Jim Crowder, our bassist for the worship band at my church. (Yes, he is in fact related to David Crowder.) This guy used to be in the metal band Bondservant, which played alongside revolutionary bands like Petra and White Cross.

Now, he writes books on the personality types of the gospel writers — oh, and, you know, self-evolving, artificially-intelligent robot bugs. Not even kidding.

Jim also has plenty of experience with dissertations. So when I asked the band to pray for my thesis, he gave me some advice.

After hearing what he had to say, I realized that academicians are really just a special type of people group. They have a special language and a special way of writing. They like to think about stuff. They like asking questions, and spinning the gears of their heads while you’re talking to them. They want you to become one of them.

My thesis adviser, Bruce, is probably the one person who has shown me the character of God most consistently this entire semester. He has believed in me even while acknowledging that I am dust. Just when I think I’ve covered a whole topic, he zooms out my perspective and shows me the vastness of the blank landscapes of human understanding. He reminds me that I’m human, and that that is actually an okay thing to be in this world. During one of our lunch meetings, in between bites of his gyro sandwich, he told me, “…and after you graduate, you’re going to graduate school.  It doesn’t matter if you were planning on it, or whether you want to. You’re going.”  I believed him.

Since a lot of academicians have their heads in the clouds and spend their time on pretty lofty things, for a lot of us, they are an “unreached” people group. But tomorrow I’m going to play pretend, become one of them, and learn to love ’em even more through this exercise. I’ve already appreciated their support, especially since my selection process last year consisted of the following steps:

Step 1: Nervously call up a professor on impulse.
Step 2: Hang up.
Step 3: Repeat.
Step 4: Forget to breathe.

I guess I have nobody to blame but God for surrounding me with just the kind of support I need.

This semester, I initiated a new small group in my church’s young adult ministry. The only reason that was possible was because there are some quality people in it. Three of the women from my group are driving all the way up to Fort Collins to come watch me talk for 15 minutes about unplanned pregnancy.

The first small group I joined in college was 6 people. The founder of that group, John, and his girlfriend, Dani, helped teach me how to be a leader and work through a very confusing time of my life. I got to go to their wedding last year. It means a lot to me that they are coming to my presentation too.

I hope they’re not doing this just because of me. I want them to be proud of my work, and also I want to make them think. I could have stuck with a simple survey about something obscure, but I’m too worried about the big picture to be able to bear that.

The biggest point I’m trying to convey in my thesis is that, for claiming to promote “fairness” and “love” and “equality” and “justice” for all human beings, we sure leave out a lot of those human beings when considering these terms. But you can read more about that in my thesis.

Anyway, I guess I don’t really know why I’m writing, except to say that, through the process of writing a 100-page thesis on unplanned pregnancy (which, naturally, took me 9 months to produce), I’ve learned to look around at all the human beings around me, over the past semester, over the past 3 years of college, and even before that. I’ve thought about the notion that you can love strangers you’ve never met, or acquaintances you’ve never loved. No matter who is around you — although, I guess it really does matter a whole lot who is around you — they are all awesome people. The words “inherent dignity” and “human worth” don’t capture their own definitions.

So I’m still nervous, and I have a bunch of other things going on that I can’t handle right now, but God comforted me today with this thought: “The Lord is my head covering.” I feel like God, at this point, is like an umbrella, shielding me from the goose-fleshing, mascara-melting, white-shirt-unfriendly powers of the storms of my life. I don’t have to pretend that, just because I’m single and all, that I have to face up to the authorities in my life all by myself. Even when my school doesn’t like me and the world of business is intimidating, all I have to worry about is following.

If you can’t come to my presentation, well, good because there’s only so many human beings you can fit in a conference room anyway. But I’ll have someone take a video for you, so you can watch me and my public speaking awkwardness, and I’ll send you my thesis if you ask me to send it (or already have).

I hope you understand how much you mean to God today.