{"id":3181,"date":"2011-02-09T11:00:37","date_gmt":"2011-02-09T16:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.drslewis.org\/camille\/?p=3181"},"modified":"2013-02-25T01:39:09","modified_gmt":"2013-02-25T01:39:09","slug":"an-open-letter-to-current-bob-jones-university-faculty-and-staff","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.drslewis.org\/camille\/2011\/02\/09\/an-open-letter-to-current-bob-jones-university-faculty-and-staff\/","title":{"rendered":"An Open Letter to Current Bob Jones University Faculty and Staff"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

My dear friends —<\/p>\n

I know morale’s low. Very, very low. I know you feel betrayed. Shafted. Unloved. And very, very angry. I know that denial stage comes quickly on the heels of those very big feelings. “Surely, this isn’t happening!” you think. Emotionally, the room spins. Your stomach bottoms out. Your heart pounds.<\/p>\n

You default to the coping mechanism you’ve learned so well: keep busy and go numb<\/a>. You sing it in hymns. “Oh, to be Nothing.” “Let me Burn Out for Thee!” “May the Lord Find Us Faithful!” You hear it in the ether. “Just two choices on the shelf: Pleasing God or pleasing self.”<\/p>\n

In the end, you’re mad that you’re feeling at all. If you could only stifle these enormously conflicted and loud emotions, you’d be okay. You’d make it. You’d conquer this pseudo-“sin” of feeling. You hope for some glimmer of kindness from this organization that you’ve devoted your entire life to serving, but it never comes. You empathize with the administration’s feelings more than your own<\/a>.<\/p>\n

You finally yell out in prayer, “God, please help me to stop caring about this!” He won’t do that. Read any Psalm and you see that they are full of these conflicted feelings. The Psalms teach us that God’s okay with our most difficult emotions. He can take it. That’s why He’s God.<\/p>\n

As you slosh through these last few months, I want you to know that God made you<\/em> — a living, breathing, feeling soul. He loves you. He redeemed you. He didn’t redeem you as an employee per se or a robot. He didn’t redeem you to stop feeling. He didn’t redeem you to be a compliant worker. He did redeem you simply because He loves you, and He feels with you. He’s as angry at the injustice as you are.<\/p>\n

And I’d like to warn you about a couple things:<\/p>\n