During the week of March 8th, at 10 AM on Monday and Tuesday morning the campus of Blue Mountain College came to a halt. All focus was on the much-anticipated revival. For an hour on both days, faculty and students alike stopped what they were doing and came together for a strengthening worship service. While the two services weren’t exactly the same, both delivered similar messages of hope and preached a sense of renewal of beliefs.
We were fortunate enough to have a guest speaker preach to us for our revival, one Dr. Bartholomew Orr. Dr. Orr is a pastor at Brown Missionary Baptist Church in Southaven and has been so for the past 32 years. Starting at the young age of 19, he let us know he answered his call from God to do so. This was an apt phrasing, as Dr. Orr’s message throughout both revival chapels was to not drop the call. Whatever that call may be from God, whether you’re an educator and your call is to help guide and teach, or whether you are a student and your call is to make sure that assignment is in on time, don’t drop the call. Everyone has experienced a dropped call in their life at some point. As Dr. Orr pointed out, it is often our most important calls that are dropped, whether due to something we can control or not. What matters is what we do after the call is dropped. Do we let it stay that way, or do we refuse to let the call drop completely? This was the overall message that Dr. Orr preached, though done in different ways for both revival chapels.
Sometimes when something is preached or taught with a view in mind, it is not always going to come across to everyone that way. While there may have been different things taken away from the revival and the message given, after talking to a few students it became relevant that they all left with fairly similar overall feelings. To let that call come through, to listen to what God has to say for us, listening for the words of that call, and be open to all that God can do through us and for us. At times like the world is experiencing now in 2021, it’s important to remember what Dr. Orr said in his Tuesday morning service: to remember what the S stands for. We are not meant to be super saints but simply be willing servants or soldiers of God. Regardless of what’s going on in the world, be faithful to the task that God has given to us, wholeheartedly follow the Lord our God, and be open to listen to God’s word. Then our spirits will be renewed, and we will be revived.
