Tag: Discipleship

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Signs

Matthew 16:3 “You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky, but you cannot interpret the signs of the times.”

The Pharisees indicted in the passage above have two interpretive problems: scope and application.

First, their scope is limited. They can interpret things well as far as weather goes, but they get caught up in the clouds and can’t think of anything more than if they will get caught in the rain this afternoon. Ultimately, the weather is less important than their soul.

Second, they fail to apply their interpretations. They think of themselves as pragmatic but in hurrying to apply a small reading they miss the broader application of the interpretive principles they’ve used. If you’ve got a high-powered laser, it seems a shame to use it to engrave your name on a penny.

In this way, their problems of scope and application are connected.

This is convicting. I already spend an inordinate time reading and writing, and it feels like a lot of the time when I’m not reading and writing, I’m thinking about how to get more time to read and write.

So, in this verse I hear Christ tell me:

“You know how to interpret Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, but you cannot interpret the needs of your own wife and child.

“You know how to interpret what the literary analysis paper from your student in a 9am literature class needs, but you cannot interpret the clear command to pray without ceasing.

“You know how to interpret the theme of addiction as worship in post-modern literature, but you cannot interpret your own restless heart.” 

God, have mercy on me a sinner.

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Games

This week, I’ve been thinking about education as a long game enterprises, but I realized this morning I’ve thought very little about literal games inside my classroom. This is primarily because I hate games. I despise them. I would never want to sit through them as a student, and I certainly wasn’t going to inflict them on my students.

But this is selfish.

My students aren’t me. My students don’t relate to the books they read like I did. This is not a bad thing. It’s a basic awareness that what works or doesn’t work for me should not exhaust my teaching repertoire. 

Games might in fact be a long-game strategy. 

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The Long Game, Continued

“The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field.” – Matthew 13:44

“The excellence of the heavenly life is not perceived, indeed, by the sense of the flesh; and yet we do not esteem it according to its real worth, unless we are prepared to deny, on account of it, all that glitters in our eyes.” – John Calvin’s Commentary on Matthew 13:44

I worry about not being able to help the students I teach who most need my help, that I’m a physician who helps wealthy people get into better shape but can’t really aid the direfully ill in their need.

This anxiety reveals that playing the short game, one that’s built on the idea that every subsequent semester will always be like this one; that if I can’t see results now, nothing substantive has happened; and that I know what I’m looking for in the first place.

The parable Christ tells typifies the long game approach, a total commitment to what eternally matters most.

I pray for kingdom eyes to see and the spirit-filled stamina required to play this long game.

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Plagiarism and Self-Deception

As I finish up my grading this semester, I’ve spotted more than my fair share of plagiarism. It’s disheartening, not just because it involves deceit but because it makes a mockery of the golden rule. This is true not just because plagiarism represents a failure to love one’s neighbor but because it shows a person unwilling to love yourself. Namely, plagiarists lie to themselves as much as they do others. It is bad enough to be deceived by someone else. The road to self-deception is a dark one indeed.

I pray for the ability to see myself truly: through the eyes of God and my neighbors. One way to do this is to cultivate humility by acknowledging my own indebtedness to the thoughts and feelings and others and consistently thanking God for what I’ve learned.

 

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Final Comments – ENGL 1013

For the first time in my teaching career, I’m typing up something like final remarks for my courses. I’ll be sharing them over the next few days. I gave a slightly modified version of the following remarks yesterday in my Intro to Lit course.

It has been difficult for me to see many of you struggle with this course. When I taught a version of this course at Charleston Southern University in the spring, I had 24 students, and while I had students who struggled, I also didn’t have the luxury to look at multiple drafts or give wholesale revision opportunities. It was tough to tell whether or not it was the students, the material, my teaching or some combination of all them. The answer is all three, and I’ve had the chance to see that play itself out this semester.

I care deeply about you and about this class because I do believe that all truth is God’s truth and that we are able to access truths about how to feel and interpret the world through our imaginations in a way that we can’t through logic. Of course, that means there’s a balance, and your assignments in this course asked you to be more logical and analytical about the imaginative truths you found in poetry, short stories, drama, and novels.

The insight Joya gave during her presentation on Tuesday—the fact that you should not love someone just for themselves but as a way of honoring God—can be preached in a sermon, encapsulated in a motivational quotation you encounter on Facebook or Twitter, or discovered through the trial and error of your real life experience. But Joya got there through a story: a novel. Not because someone had laid out a logical case for it and she, after twenty hours of deliberation and hearing both sides, finally assented, but because in some key way the novel helped her feel it. Continue reading “Final Comments – ENGL 1013”

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Final Comments – ENGL 2703

For the first time in my teaching career, I’m typing up something like final remarks for my courses. I’ll be sharing them over the next few days. I gave a slightly modified version of the following remarks today in my one upper division course, Non-Fiction and Its Process. 

I’d never taught this kind of course before. In fact, no one had taught this kind of course at SWU before. It had been on the books for multiple years before I showed up and hadn’t been taught once.

If you didn’t know that I’m not an expert in this field, then listening to our guest speaker Jeremy Jones on Tuesday surely clued you in to what a dude who’s an expert sounds like. I think he dropped more quotations and article references in an hour than I have all semester.

You probably didn’t know what you were getting yourselves into when you signed up for the course. I really didn’t either. And here we are.

So here’s some of what I’ve learned: Continue reading “Final Comments – ENGL 2703”

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Guest Speakers

But he gives us more grace. That is why Scripture says: “God opposes the proud but shows favor to the humble.” – James 4:6

Yesterday, Jeremy B. Jones came and talked to my Non-Fiction and Its Process class. He teaches non-fiction at Western Carolina University, and he  read some of his super fascinating current book project and liberally dropped quotations from cool people like Anne Lamott and Richard Hugo and Marianne Moore and used Harry Potter references to explain how essays should work (e.g. memoirs should be filled with “portkeys”) and was just a consummate professional.

Now, Jeremy’s got pedigree and the ethos to spare. Boasting an MFA from the University of Iowa and a first-book memoir that’s won awards will do that.

Add to that that I’ve felt like an imposter all semester teaching this class and that the topic was the real deal for him? You have the ingredients for seeing a master display that left invigorated and more than a little humbled. Continue reading “Guest Speakers”

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Playing Injured

But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. – II Cor. 12:9

When I watch sporting events and the announcers tell me that so-and-so is questionable because of a sore hamstring or right bicep, I expect the person to perform well regardless. It’s not a fair expectation, but I have it anyway. I think it’s because I have never had never had those particular injuries, I can’t immediately put myself into the position of imagining what playing the sport while nursing those injuries feels like.

Here’s what I do know about: sore throats. Over the past two weeks, I’ve had what amounts to a canker sore on my epiglottis. My entire mouth hurts any time that I swallow. This consequently makes simple and important tasks like eating and sleeping and talking painful.

This is a comparatively small thing. I wonder if I had this ailment for a month, I would adjust and the pain would start to become cognitively dull for me. It doesn’t feel that way today.

What I do know is that it makes teaching hard. I feel like I’m playing injured. I have not told my students about my ailment, but I wonder if my demeanor is different or if they have same faulty expectations of me that I do of athletes: “Hey, if he’s up there teaching, he must be at full strength.”

I realize how often I’m guilty of assuming things just by examining students’ demeanors. They’re in class so they must be at full strength. Their waning attention is a moral or intellectual lapse, not a result of the physical or emotional toll outside circumstances have taken on them.

My sore throat has made me thankful. I take smaller bites of food and end up savoring it more. I choose my words sparingly and end up listening more.

It also makes me think about all the things I consider my strengths. If God’s strength is made perfect in weakness and I’m waiting for my own perfection to perform well, I’m elevating my own strengths above God’s. I don’t want to play hurt and because of that, I can’t see the ways I play hurt even when I think I’m fine. A sore throat is better than the millstone of pride, and I pray that emerge from this ailment healthier and humbler.

 

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Sustainability

On a moment to moment basis, a large portion of my mental bandwidth is spent worrying about the present moment being repeated into the future ad infinitum or figuring out how to replicate the present moment forever.

Examples range from my daughter’s coughing (will she ever stop?), to some new reading method (how do I apply this to every book I own?), or some classroom exercise that works (how do I do this all the time?) to a good day with my wife (can’t we do this all the time?).

These feelings are often distortions of a very real prayer: “Let your kingdom come, let your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

My desire for positive sustainability is a yearning for eternity here on earth. I must say, a lot of times I’m glad God doesn’t give me what I want.

God has dealt with me a lot this year about my tendency for longing for the past, either in regret over what I failed to do or in longing to do again what I used to do. When I carry that tendency into the present, it’s like I’m in perpetual state of melancholy.

The reality is that this is always happening:  “Therefore [Christ] is able to save completely those who come to God through him, because he always lives to intercede for them.” (Hebrews 7:25)

I pray for a child’s faith to rejoice in that reality to know that because of Christ my Father gives bread and not stones. Because of Christ, I can live in true thankfulness: for when my daughter does stop coughing, for when I have a reading experience that proves fruitful, for when something I do in the classroom helps my students, and when I have a great day with my wife.

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#3Gratitudes

Every class this semester, I’ve handed my students a daily worksheet with a space to write down three gratitudes.

Then, we’ve actually started each class by closing our eyes and focusing on the gratitudes as a way to attune our hearts to God’s goodness.

It’s been personally beneficial and has offered a segue into prayer before every class. More than that, it’s helped focus me for the fifty or seventy-five minutes I have with my students.

At times this semester, I wonder whether it’s benefiting my students.

This morning, I received this email from a student in my comp class.

I…ran across this [article link] on the internet. I thought it was so cool since we do gratitudes every morning in your class which has become a habit for me personally. Now one of the most successful women in the world is doing daily gratitudes like we do here at SWU in Central, SC…
So Cool!

Yes, it is. Needless to say, it made my day before my day even began.

God is incredibly good and certainly worthy of me giving thanks.