L’Abri in Review: The Swing of the Pendulum

Sadly, today begins the last week we'll be here at L'Abri. It’s hard to recap specifics of things we’re learning because there is SO much. Every meal, every lecture is an intensely different topic. It’s been fantastic to have the time every day all week to just think while we study, work, eat, etc.

But on a big picture level, we ('we' pertaining to Hannah and Micah, not the L'Abri community) have been talking much lately about “the swing of the pendulum” as it relates to our approach to life and Christianity. Unknowingly we had allowed ourselves to be strung up so tight in one direction by pop-culture American Christianity. That isn’t meant to be a knock on anyone or anything as there is a significant recognized component of personal responsibility. But at the same time, that is the world we’ve been consumed by, from church our whole lives, to Christian college, to jobs in non-profit ministries, relational expectations, etc.

However, many of the details or conclusions of what we claimed to believe were hard to sit with and at some point a couple years ago, it snapped and our pendulum began to swing. And what happens when a pendulum is strung up one direction and let go? Well, that’s what happened to us. At the point we came here, we were pretty much on the far side of the swing. And surprisingly, that’s been a very common experience for many of the students here. Most are here because of disillusionment with American Christianity.

And what I’d say has been happening is that the staff here has been helping us to gently lower our pendulum to a resting point in the center. Actually it’s more like they’ve been helping us to lower our pendulum to a less volatile swing.

We’ve been learning how to question and critique and learn for ourselves when we hear things that don’t sit right, from the world or from the church. And we can take these tools from here and continue the learning we have barely begun to practice.