Young Adult Interview with James Guthrie
By Janine C. Hagan
James Guthrie is a 22 year old native of Scottsboro, Alabama. James is currently a senior at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, where he is a brother in the Christian fraternity Beta Upsilon Chi and active in Baptist Collegiate Ministries in addition to several non-religious campus groups.

Janine: When I first met James, he was working in Birmingham for the summer. It was rather a shock to find that he not only possesses the great gift of making friends everywhere he goes, but that he had been the founder and editor of his own ezine! Before we get to that, I would like for James to tell us something himself and about his background.

Janine: Tell us about yourself right now and about your experience at Vanderbilt University. And, in talking about your family and your faith history, James, what are the most important things that you would like to share with us?

James: Since this is my final semester of undergraduate study here at Vanderbilt, I have been doing a lot of reflecting on my life lately, especially on how it has changed in the past four years. Through this reflection I’ve gained new appreciation for how fortunate my family situation has been. I am the third of six children from my parents’30-plus year marriage, and my home growing up was both loving and God-centered.

But, I know from working with ministers that churches expect that even the children from good Christian homes will usually stop attending at 18 (college) and not come back until 30 (when they start their own families). My life was beginning to follow a similar pattern in my first few semesters at school before I became involved in Beta Upsilon Chi fraternity. Communion with the other believers in BYX has been a great catalyst of growth in my life, kept Christ at the forefront of my daily life and encouraged me to be more active in loving, serving, and discipling.

Janine: When I met you last summer, you “wowed” me with your very own ezine! Will you tell us something about that?

James: Certainly! For better and for worse, I seem to have less inhibition than most people I know. So when I learned how to design websites and how easy they were to publish I created sites for several different purposes. My main project has been AlabamaRunners.com, which covers Alabama high school track & field and cross country, but I have also made sites as tributes to friends, made designs for other people, and even made a fundraising website to pay off a parking ticket!

I started a weekly ezine in the winter of 2002 called “Top Eight, Bottom Four” and continue to publish it in my Instant Messenger profile though my online archive of the lists has become outdated. It’s based on a popular concept that has several different names—the book you gave me this summer calls it the “Examen,” I’ve heard other people call it “roses and thorns”—but it’s basically a reflective exercise to name the highs and lows of a given time period.

For me, the weekly Top Eight has been a great mental exercise in which I reflect back to remember eight things that charmed me in the previous week and four things that irritated me. The numbers are arbitrary, but the ratio is very intentional, as it forces me to express twice as much gratitude for God’s blessings as I express frustration for the various trials I fall into. Because I keep this list I am more aware of blessings when they occur and make more conscious effort to remember them, which has led to a general attitude of joy through every day, and unexpected occurrences are far more likely to make me laugh than to upset me. The list is also a useful way for my friends or anyone else interested to keep track of what important things are going on in my life.

Janine: What brings you the greatest energy when you contemplate leaving the academic life and pursuing a job/career?

James: It seems like I get better adjusted to the college life every day, and it is going to be hard to leave. Part of me wishes I could respond with exciting, specific career plans and how I plan to charge into adult life as a full-throttle, purpose-driven spiritual warrior, but my career plans are currently far from specific. College graduation represents a major life transition for me, and the most exciting thing is how well I feel God has prepared me to deal with these periods of uncertainty simply by trusting in Him.

I feel a lot more peace as a college senior than I did as a high school senior. Of course I plan to actively pursue a good career track, one that will allow me to use and develop the interpersonal and organizational skills I have developed. So while I am not waiting on God to drop a job into my lap, I am so assured that His provisional hand will guide me through employment and all areas of life that I can face the future with confidence instead of anxiety. Wherever I go, my most important aim will be to maintain a God-centered worldview and continue to see everything I do as a service to Him.

Janine: I understand that you have been on some mission trips and are in the process of planning more. Will you share something about your mission work with us?

James: Like Christian fellowship, evangelism is a relatively new development in my life. I recently traveled to southern Florida over spring break with the Vanderbilt BCM to help a very new, small church reach its community with a backyard Bible club for the children in an apartment complex, many of whom were immigrants with little knowledge of who God is. It was exhilarating to be able to share the basic truths of the gospel message with those children and it was a trip I will never forget!

I have grown more comfortable with the idea of missionary work and evangelism because my church in Nashville, Grace Community Church, emphasizes missions very heavily and makes it easy to become involved. Grace works through long-term mission partnerships, and in June I have the opportunity to participate in the church’s partnership with the former Soviet state of Belarus.

Originally I had been signed up to help work an English as a Second Language conference, which have been huge ministries for missionaries in that area because they can use Christian literature as the ESL curriculum. Plans got changed around, though, and now I will be helping a missionary with youth baseball clinics. The evangelism will be more relational and improvisational through the baseball clinics than it may have been through the ESL conferences, and I am praying that I will have the courage to overcome the greater challenges.

Janine: Our theme in this issue of ecumininet™ online! is “Pentecost and Promise.” It is obvious that the fire of the Holy Spirit which burned in the hearts of the apostles is something that you understand. Do you have any particular wonderings/thoughts about Pentecost that you would like to share with us? How do you connect the energy or the ”promise” of Pentecost to this point in your life?

James: The gift of the Holy Spirit fascinates me. The Spirit dwells within every believer and acts as the “helper” that Jesus promised to send, but I still struggle to understand all of the implications of that indwelling. This is a major issue, of course, because better understanding of the role of the Spirit is better understanding of things such as fellowship, evangelism, and prayer that I’ve already mentioned. At the same time, though, it’s reassuring that we aren’t commanded to understand or relate to the Spirit per se, only to receive it as a means for relating to God.

<<Back to Archive

View for Printing

Contributors
Staff
Advertising
Internships

Send this Page to a Friend

Add Me to Mailing List