I mean, you are just at the mercy of something so much larger than yourself. You're tiny. Chesterton has this really beautiful bit: how much larger your life would be if you could become smaller in it.
Moved to a classical school in 9th grade in Branson, Missouri, the weirdest place on earth. I was a SparkNotes kid trying to avoid the reading. My teacher assigned this book called *Orthodoxy* by G.K. Chesterton. I looked online and there wasn't a SparkNotes page for this book. So, I guess if I'm going to do okay on the quiz, I've got to at least start skimming.
Opening it up, it was like, yeah, I was pierced by something. And that was for me a gateway into a lot of things that I could have never expected.
We were on a senior trip. We go into St. Peter's. Michelangelo's *Pietà*. I'll never forget. I go and I'm just kind of standing there looking at it and I started just kind of weeping uncontrollably for no reason. "What is happening to me right now?" Something was reaching out to me beyond what I could kind of explain or understand. I was like, whatever is here, I need to find more of. You're being drawn into a story that's way larger than yours. It's going to have to change a lot of my priorities.
It's a joy to be with all of you today. My name's Coby. I work at Pepperdine University out in sunny Malibu, California. On the one side, I'm writing for a living. I'm a writer and I get to work with executives at Pepperdine, largely with President Gash.
And then on the other side of things, I'm teaching freshmen every semester who a lot of times don't have a ton of experience asking the big questions: What is wisdom and virtue? Who's God? Why do truth, goodness, and beauty matter? Why am I in college? What is vocation and calling? And what sort of questions should I be asking myself about where I'm going in the long term?
Kierkegaard says, "Life can only be understood backwards. It has to be lived forwards." And I think both of those things are really true.
The great thing about surfing for me is that I suck at it. You know what Chesterton says, though? "Anything worth doing is worth doing badly."
Chesterton has this really beautiful bit: "Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly. Whereas Satan fell by force and gravity, by heaviness, by thinking that he had to be something."
When we think of ourselves as smaller, when we shed the weight of thinking we've got to be the biggest thing, the main character, that's actually when paradoxically we can ascend to become what we were created to be. It's levity that lives. It could be all the above. How much larger your life would be if you could become smaller in it.
