Drop-your-rock moments

During my final year of Journalism, I decided that I didn’t actually want to be a journalist and that, somewhere along the university path, I had received dodgy information from God and he was just now, nearing the completion of my degree, filling me in: “You’re not meant to be a journalist, Elizabeth.”

With little choice at this late stage, I told God I wasn’t a quitter and enrolled in my final journalism class, “Internship”.

I have been working with Marjorie, Stephen and the team at Insights for almost five months now as an intern journalist and the experience has raised and answered a number of questions for me as I leave the student world and prepare to enter the “real world”.

While recently reading a short book titled Dropping Your Rock, by Nicole Johnson, I was encouraged to review Jesus’ teaching in John 8, about a woman caught in an act of adultery and the people ready to judge her with rocks.

Johnson encourages us to choose love over judgment and to put down our rock. She reminded me that rocks do not hit sin, they hit people; there are not enough rocks in the world; and the only one with the right to judge is the One who paid the price for our sin and became our Rock — Jesus.

Drop-my-rock moments first began as I travelled into the city on the dreaded train, week after week, to my internship. I began to understand that God’s children are not all white, middle class suburbanites with 2.4 children who worship weekly.

God’s child was the person sitting next to me, the smelly builder, the babbling drunk, the dirty homeless person and the animated student.

Travelling on the train taught me to put down my rock and understand that every creation is God’s.

But it didn’t stop there. Insights gave me the opportunity to work in the “real world”. Short tea breaks, movie reviews and good-humoured conversation was part of this. And so was discovering and accepting different opinions, work methods, lifestyles, and stories and, most importantly, different people.

You can’t be a journalist without people — and it was people, God’s creations, that I was regularly in contact with and blessed by.

I was reminded, with every person I spoke to and every story I have written, where God is and where God wants to be.

You can’t be a journalist without being in the real world either. While the stories I enjoyed involved people using their gifts and resources to worship and honour God, I have also heard and written stories of struggle, poverty, loneliness and desperation.

God has allowed me to complete university on his strength, endurance, ability, support and love; and through my parents, friends and ever-listening partner.

I do want to be a journalist today, if only so that I can continue to meet the people God has placed on this earth — people who were not created by mistake, but with purpose.

I graduate in December, and one of my certificates will have the word Journalism celebrated on it.

Finding a job is the next step and working with Insights has prepared me for the world of journalism: missing computer files, photographs and interview transcripts and the irreversible printing error.

But God didn’t send me the wrong degree, and he certainly didn’t send me the wrong experiences. It’s time to rock and roll!

Elizabeth Gorham