It has been a while since I last posted an Impact video blog, so Waldo and I decided to step up the production values for this one. We discuss the retreat, we discuss Waldo’s growing mustache, and then we break out into a genuinely serious conversation about how to be a tool for God.
Those three things are in that order on purpose. Stay with me.
Where We Have Been
The honest answer for why there has not been a blog in a while is that summer school happened. I have been wasting most of my life on statistics, which is a math class, which I want you to know I did not enjoy.
Waldo has also been extremely busy. He has been at home playing Call of Duty, trying to get all the achievements, which means he does not sleep anymore and all he eats is porridge, because that is all he has time for. Call of Duty demands his time. I want to stress that he volunteered this information.
Something Is Different About Your Face
The moment we start filming I can tell something is off about him and I cannot place it. He denies it. I keep pushing. He eventually claims it is Botox and that he cannot stop smiling.
It is not Botox. He has been growing out a mustache for about a month and a half and it is now a solid centimeter long, and he describes it as righteous and gnarly, and he mentions that he gets egg stuck in it sometimes and that birds occasionally attack his face because they want to build a nest in it.
Why is he growing it? For the freshmen. For you. He feels like this is something you are going to appreciate. I point out that this does not make any sense at all, and he counters with a list of celebrities who are beloved for their mustaches, most of whom do not have mustaches.
This is the level of discourse you can expect from us all summer.
1,118 Freshmen
Here is the number that actually matters, and it stopped both of us for a second when it came up on camera. There are now over 1,118 freshmen signed up for Impact.
Look at how that has moved. The first blog we shot, it was around 450. The second one, a couple of weeks later, it was over 700. Now it is past eleven hundred, and there is still a chunk of summer left to go. Waldo cannot count that high. I cannot really say the number out loud either. That is a thousand of you coming to a retreat that exists entirely so that you do not show up to a campus of fifty thousand people in August and feel like you are the only one there.
And of course the freshman whose signup letter Waldo read aloud in the last blog gets another shoutout, because he is our favorite. We are not allowed to have favorites. We do.
What We Actually Mean By Tools For God
Then the video turns, and I want to explain why, because on the surface it looks like whiplash.
We say we want to spend a minute talking about being tools for God, and what follows immediately is a joke at our own expense involving a Christian rap track, which is very much not what we meant. That is the setup. The word tool is doing something silly in English and we let it be silly for about a minute before we get to the point.
The point is 1 Peter 4:10 and 11, which Waldo reads on camera. It is the passage about each person using whatever gift they have received to serve one another, speaking as though speaking the words of God and serving with the strength God provides, so that God gets the glory rather than the person doing the serving.
And then he says the thing that is really the whole reason these videos exist. We spend a lot of time being goofy on camera, him and me, but our actual wish for you is exactly what that passage says. That whatever you say and whatever you do, you would do it as an instrument for God’s glory. Not ours. That is our hope for you, and it is our hope for our staff too.
That is what we meant by tools. Instruments.
See You In August
That is about all the time we have time for today, which is a sentence Waldo said and which I am leaving in because it is funnier than anything I could write.
If you are coming to Texas A&M or Blinn this fall and you have not signed up yet, go do that at impactretreat.com. And please go check out our first two video blogs, Blogadiddy and That’s Trendy, if you have not seen them. Feel free to leave me a comment letting me know what you think!