Christian Community and Engineers

I had a lovely evening. Besides the fact that I finished my Exilic Prophets paper, and feel pretty good about it (after a major strike of divine inspiration on the ending of the paper, a couple of hours before it was due...Thanks God!), I had a great evening of conversation with some of my friends from church tonight.

One of my friends from church, who is a graduate student in engineering at Georgia Tech, really wanted to talk about how it looks to live for God "all the way" and about what it means to live in intentional community, and if that's a necessity for all Christians (obviously, one of my favorite topics ). But the content of the conversation isn't really what I want to talk about here.

The thing that really struck me tonight was how much we need people from all types of vocations and mentalities in the Body of Christ. Because he's an engineer, and doesn't spent all day every day in seminary, his questions and perspective were so new and refreshing to me. It was so beautiful to see what things bothered him, really made him passionate, and how devoted he was to God. Some of his questions were challenging for me, because I think sometimes you can get stuck in a certain Christian paradigm--where the people you talk to (be they mainline, Catholic, totally charismatic, or Emergent church folks, or whatever) just don't challenge you in a certain way, y'know?

So anyway, tonight, I guess what I'm saying, is I'm thankful for engineers.