Letter from the Editor
Kathy Luo
Dear reader,
Welcome to another issue of Cornerstone! To be honest, being
able to say "another" feels strange. I'm writing this as I end my
junior fall at Brown, and like everyone will tell you, it went by so
quickly. Without our notice, day to day becomes week to week,
then month to month, and eventually, year to year.
Christians say that the moment you choose God, your life will
never be the same. How then do we explain the way we float
through it? I wrestled with this dissonance for a long time. My
pursuit of God didn’t bear any similarity to the miraculous con-
version stories I heard about in church; I didn’t have a great en-
counter that changed my perspective on faith forever. Instead,
I grew so slowly that I often questioned if I was growing at all.
I would wonder if God was disappointed in me for my lack of
vigor, or temporary bouts of it, only to lose it again.
But in this state of tedium there’s a strange paradox. C.S. Lewis
had a nice way of putting it: “Isn’t it funny how day by day
nothing changes, but when you look back, everything is differ-
ent...”. I think transformation often works like this. After re-
flecting on the past two years of college, I’ve realized that the
daily events and challenges my life have amounted to more than
the sum of their parts. There have been spiritual lows, spiritual
highs, a plethora of days that cruised closer to the median. But
through it all, I’ve grown—and to my surprise, so has my faith.
I’ve learned that even when nothing makes sense to me, God
knows the ways in which He is molding me with certainty. And
that is my version of transformation.
The process is unique for all of us. Perhaps some of you have
had that miraculous event in your life that brought you closer
to God (I have to say, even though I’ve accepted the nature of
my walk, I’m still a little jealous). For others, change could have
been a step-by-step journey. You may be undergoing change at
this very moment, with or without an understanding of God’s
place in it. To accompany you on this walk, the theme of this
issue is Transformation. In these pages, we have pieces deal-
ing with identity seeking, instability in the church, even fresh
thoughts on age-old fundamentals like the Old Testament and
the Trinity. Considering change in any of these contexts can be
intimidating. But in that consideration, there is also tremendous
opportunity for beautiful transformations—and I pray that
some of these words may encourage you in that journey.
4 Spring 2018
And of course, for those who feel like life is pretty stable right
now: the absence of transformation may not be a bad thing. As
a final note before sending you forward, let us remember that
the feeling of sameness does not necessarily mean dullness. A
certain thought has kept me going recently: that in some ways,
a life that steadily continues may be the greatest testament any
of us could have to God’s steady hand over it.
That thought does shake a little bit of the stupor out of my
life, even in the small, daily things. It’s yet another paradox:
that something so constant can be the very force that changes
everything.
Changing but remaining,
Kathy Luo, Editor-in-Chief