The Importance of Patience When Waiting for The Perfect Life Partner from God

The February 19th chapel began with the praise songs "Trading My Sorrows" and "Son of God". After the event announcements, the first of the two speakers, LaMoine Tatum, took the podium with her poem. The poem described how she was immersed with sin and was pretending to be a devout Christian, then went into detail of how she felt alienated by how He is able to see all of her, even her flaws. She then became pregnant as a result of relations with a man she wasn't terribly in love with, and the trauma of the subsequent abortion threw her into an identity crisis, where she truly found a connection with God.

After a brief prayer (so brief, in fact, I couldn't tell what it was about) the second speaker, Bruce Tate, assumed the podium and began his story. His life began inadvertently when his mother was 15, and like the other speakers so far, his family had a heavy church attendance. This early style of life later helped assuage doubts about becoming more religiously involved. Prior to this, his faith was not always his first priority. In middle school, he struggled to keep loyal to his church, as it had less sway in his day-to-day life at this point, and he didn't yet know to reach out to it. In high school, however, there were a great number of religion-based activities, and his joining of choir worked to rebuild his connection with the church. It was near this time that an elder gave him a snippet of wisdom: "Your relationship with God is your own. You don't need to do as the others do." The flurry of activity and worry brought by the transition to college again blew him off the path, most of said activity and worry being caused by football. During his sophomore summer, he returned to his hometown to reconnect with his friends, and as it turned out, God as well. One of the activities of that summer was a canoe trip down a local river. As the trip progressed, the party picked up more individuals and friends. The group was near a seaside cliff one day of the trip, and they were all cliff diving. Jerry, a longtime mentor and friend of Bruce's went for a dive, and the shock of the landing knocked the man out, causing him to drown.

The sudden loss of someone during a happy activity put the group into shock, and caused Bruce to realize that tomorrow isn't always promised to us. With this in mind, he was more aware of his need to be loyal to God than ever, and once and for all promised his life to the Lord. Upon his return to Ottawa University, he joined and subsequently was cut from the basketball team. During the discussion that follows such an event, Bruce brought up with his coach the fact that Bruce wanted to become a coach himself. A short time later, Bruce received a call from his former coach, where he was informed of an opportunity to be an assistant coach for someone on campus. This assistant job has since evolved into his full-on coaching. He then took a moment in this soliloquy to reflect on how he had a slum-like childhood home, and was able to move up from it. He concluded his speech with three lessons. The first of these is that if you trust the machines around you to perform their task, then there is no reason you can't trust God to do His. The second is that life presents a lot of challenges, and that if you take them on full-force, your life will be improved. Lastly, he taught that you must be patient to meet your perfect life partner, the spouse that is both supportive and able to drive you to be more than you are. The chapel as a whole concluded with the song My Savior, My God.