Believing your words

I am typically not one to hear a sermon and immediately figure out just how it should apply to my life. Today, however, the church message seemed to immediately reflect some thoughts I was having in my own personal life. Without getting too far in, the message basically was that we will speak boldly when we believe deeply.

For the purposes of the sermon, the message was intended to reflect that those who are stronger believers in Christianity would tend to be stronger messengers of that message. Probably. Maybe. I mean, there are probably some huge believers of something who just don't know exactly how to properly interact with people and can't boldly get a message across. That is just how life works - some people just have better relational skills than others.

However, for my purposes what stood out about this was tied to what I go through in life every day. For those of you who know or maybe don't know (and I realized this week this "know or maybe don't know" is a phrase I apparently love to use), I have been the media specialist for Langston University. Recently, after losing our director, I have taken on the additional task of handling the marketing for the main campus. So, now I have the normal pressure of being a publicist for the main campus and now I have an additional duty (among other duties) to tie that to our advertising and marketing goals as well.

I realized that my job duties tied to today's sermon almost immediately. People often come by our office and suggest it, or sometimes just talk about it behind our backs about the need to do more to get out positive messages about what it is that Langston University has to offer. In so many ways, I agree. What we have been attempting to work on is to get more people to step up and let us know what they know that they aren't telling us. And then what can we do to get them to tell us so that we can tell everyone else. It would be like trying to spread Christianity without having the stories in the Bible. But even then, we haven't yet hit the relationship between the sermon and the task at hand.

If you have people who want the university to look good and then they bad-mouth everyone and everything about the university, they are speaking boldly (negatively) about something they DO NOT believe deeply. If they are viewing their job only as a paycheck, then they are not fully committing themselves to believing in the positives that take place around them every day. I'm not using this forum as a way to criticize those people but it goes along with the phrase - if you are not with me, then you must be against me. So my hope is that people will take some evaluations of themself and determine what they want - personal fulfullment and riches or doing what is best for the school for which they work. In as much as it wouldn't help the Christian religion any to have all of its followers be agnostics and atheists, Langston University is in need of positive support more so than at any other time.

We have plenty of people who sit around and complain - they are called voters (and I say this somewhat tongue-in-cheek but also from experience). Those who want to do something positive need to do so and remember that to have the ability to speak boldly, you must first believe deeply. The time to believe is now.

J.W.O.A.G.