Wheaton College Alumni Magazine Spring 2013 | Page 50

FACULTYvoice
Living Between Two Mountains
How should this professor live in healthy rhythms between tensing
desires of faith and learning?
by Dr. Robert L. Gallagher, Chair of Intercultural Studies

silence in communion with God, and
the noise and bustle of evangelical
learning. I long for a slower and quieter
pace of life amid the bath of actuality:
joyous study, writing, and teaching.
How do I maintain a healthy rhythm
of living between these two mountains
of desire? Where does my help come
from to adopt healthy rhythms with
layers of work, family, prayer, solitude,
and play, all wrapped in an awareness of
fulfillment in life?
Contemporary western society is so
often identified with furious activism
and optimistic reason at the neglect of
simply living: to feel, sense, taste the
blessings of life all around us through
nature and humanity. We deafen
ourselves with pursuits and ideologies,
and miss the reality that God desires to
speak in the midst of growing isolation
and loneliness. Our culture is more
detached from one another than ever
before through longer working hours
live in the uncomfortable tension
and distances to commute, resulting in
between two mountains, and at times
less availability for human connections.
I am not sure of the right way to cope.
With sips of interaction we spend more
This summer our Intercultural Studies
and more time alone together.
graduate department moved to a new
Jesus also was flanked by these two
location at the Billy Graham Center,
mountains of spiritual intimacy and
and I landed in an office with a window
activity-oriented encounters. After
that overlooks Blanchard Hall on the
hearing of John’s execution in Matthew
mount, an icon of North American
14, Jesus left his followers to be alone,
evangelicalism. And sitting in my office
only to be intercepted by a huge crowd.
chair I can also look through a window
Then with compassion he taught,
into the corridor and see an enormous
healed, and fed the people before he sent
photo of a monk from Mount Carmel
them away and continued his journey.
near Haifa, who took a 30-year vow of
Following this intensity of ministry,
silence. Daily I walk between these two
Jesus insisted that his disciples leave him
appealing and opposing mounts: monastic and “sent the people home”—for a time

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he turned his back on human needs to go
“up into the hills by himself to pray.”
What I enjoy most is a contemplative
life—not in the sense of an intense
spirituality of a 30-year vow of silence,
but in my everyday existence. For me
it is a bubbling pleasure to read, think,
and write; to walk through Buswell
Library between aisles of learning. I have
contentment with my family and friends,
and peace at home. Yet I have endeavors
of work and ministry, responsibility
and decisions, being everywhere and
doing everything that drown my good
intentions.
What to do?
“I look up to the mountains—does
my help come from there?” asks the
psalmist. “My help comes from the
L ORD, who made heaven and earth!”
(Ps. 121:1-2, NLT). Occasions come
when we need to detach, to push away
the ruckus that sometimes buries us in
petty details and encumbers our hearts,
and turn our face toward God to seek
perspective and renovation. It is in him
that our salvation lies.

Dr. Robert Gallagher (Ph.D., Fuller
Theological Seminary) is department chair,
director of the M.A. program in intercultural
studies, and associate professor of intercultural studies at Wheaton College Graduate
School, where he has taught since 1998. He
previously served as president of the
American Society of Missiology (20102011) and as an executive pastor in
Australia (1979-90), as well as being
involved in short-term theological education
in Papua New Guinea and the South
Pacific since 1984. His publications include
co-editing Footprints of God: A Narrative
Theology of Mission (MARC 1999),
Mission in Acts: Ancient Narratives in
Contemporary Contexts (Orbis Books
2004), and Landmark Essays in Mission
and World Christianity (Orbis Books
2009).