#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.

 

Grateful for Voices

As the semester progressed, I started modeling more and more of the work I asked my students to do. It was fine to write rough drafts because then I could model revision. The tough part was writing a purposefully rough opening draft, and even more specifically, failing in that draft in a way that would help highlight typical student errors. My voice was always off. I seemingly cannot write like anyone but myself.

Today, I had the opportunity to revisit the essays of some students I taught in the spring. I was struck by how good one of them was, so struck in fact that I reached out to the student to say thank you. Not only were the insights unique, but they were expressed in a way that was totally unlike mine. I was encountering a student who had already developed her voice. Her critical acumen was still growing, but she had figured out how to write things effectively. The fact that she had something to say made the essay all the more a delight.

I’m so thankful for moments like this where I confront in my own students’ work the kind of reading and writing that I certainly could not imitate. I can only sound like me, which is a good thing and bad thing. It’s most often a bad thing when it becomes clear that I’m writing for an audience other than my students, the ostensible beneficiaries of the model. I don’t want students to produce essays I could write. I want them to write better, more diverse essays. This particular student nailed it.

I pray for the wisdom to hear student voices and the willingness to highlight and share them. When I am listening, they are indeed a beauty to hear.

38 Now as they were traveling along, He entered a village; and a woman named Martha welcomed Him into her home. 39 She had a sister called Mary, who was seated at the Lord’s feet, listening to His word. 40 But Martha was distracted with [a]all her preparations; and she came up to Him and said, “Lord, do You not care that my sister has left me to do all the serving alone? Then tell her to help me.”41 But the Lord answered and said to her, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and bothered about so many things; 42 but only one thing is necessary, for Mary has chosen the good part, which shall not be taken away from her.”  (Luke 10:38-42 NASB)

I am a Martha.

Let me put a finer point on it.

I am a Steven Covey reading, Zig Ziglar listening, Tony Robbins Personal Power II owning Martha.

Goals? Responsibilities? Affirmations? Identified. Discerned. Verbalized.

In the words of the lay philosopher Larry the Cable Guy, git-r-dun.

So this passage from Luke is a convicting one. Continue reading “”

Teaching and Power

Job 36:22 “God is exalted in his power. Who is a teacher like him?”

This passage makes me uncomfortable, mainly because it connects power and teaching. The two sentences form a causal relationship. Because God is exalted, Elihu appears to say, who is a teacher like him?

The answer is no one. In his absolute power, God confronts us with our powerlessness and offers to teach us contingent on our fear and awe.

It jars against the image we have of Christ in John 13 washing the disciples feet, telling them they are right to call him rabbi and to do as he has done: serve their students.

The Job verse makes me uncomfortable because I don’t want to think through the kind of power that I have at my disposal: be responsible for the factor I play in a student’s educational future or the duty I have to God to make sure that what I’m teaching glorifies him.

The power God has is not an end in itself. He does not teach in order to exert power. He uses that power in order to teach, love, and serve. In the same way, Christ lowers himself not as a way of making himself less the Son of God but as a way to show us that his power is a means to an end: communion with us through service.

I pray that I will use the power God has given me to better serve my students: neither denying or remaining unconscious of that power nor using it as an end. It is by following Christ’s example that I can best merge education and discipleship.

Asking Questions

Job 31: 15 “Did not he who made me in the womb make them? Did not the same one form us both within our mothers?”

I like to ask questions. The problem is that, more times than I’d like to admit, I ask questions because I don’t want to accept an answer rather than out of a desire to know the answer.

The book of Job is filled with questions and, in fact, culminates with the questions God asks Job.

Job knows the answer to these two questions he asks about his accusers.

Yes.

Most definitely.

God made Job, and God made his accusers.

That is, Job and his accusers are alike at the deepest level.

Job brings up the womb quite pointedly. For the past several chapters, he’s heard his “friends” declare what’s been wrong with Job’s life post-birth. Their categories have been simple: righteous and unrighteous. Since God only punishes the unrighteous, Job’s current predicament indicates his sinfulness.

But these categories are examples of what Alan Jacobs calls “lumping” in his book How to Think. Lumping is an important cognitive exercise where we group data into existing categories, but precisely because those categories are old standbys, they tend to get trotted out as a way to avoid reflection.

Job’s category—a single one that includes both him and his accusers and everyone else—is made up of people God created. This is what Alan Jacobs calls splitting, an example where Job has categorized data by a new set of categories. In this sense, he’s “splitting” even though he trots out one less category than his friends.

This push and pull between familiar and unfamiliar categories is old hat for me, and I’ve been feeling it a lot lately: namely, the need to evaluate more, to lean into difficult questions and underlying tensions with my faith and my relationships even while trying to practice a kind of patience that allows these tensions to exist without me trying to fix them right away.

Keeping that balance on my own is impossible. It requires the Spirit.

What’s particularly difficult about this balance is that this tension is never lived out in a vacuum. It’s not an experiment in some laboratory. I can see my own inner turmoil play itself out in my family life or inside my classroom.

Am I separate or part of the community? Am I trying to reach an agreement and find commonality or is it my job to divide and separate? Am I to apply existing categories to new data or do my best to find new categories to apply to old data?

As a disciple and educator, these are questions I will be asking the rest of my life.

Unlike Job’s questions, I don’t know the answer.

Like Job, I know the one who does.

Revision and Discipleship

Revelation 2:19 “I know your deeds, your love and faith, your service and perseverance, and that you are now doing more than you did at first.”

This is a season of revision for me and my students. I’m revising a journal article that’s been rejected. My students are going back through the semester’s first graded essay and, if they feel so inclined, revising them even as they’ve turned in a second essay and working on a third. I’m revising my teaching methods to address the concerns I have after seeing their first two essays.

In both my writing and teaching, I see the need for constant improvement.

This is happening in my discipleship as well. Books by Richard Foster and Shane Claiborne have called me out for my complacency, the ways that I explain away lingering selfishness or disregarding ways I know God wants me to live out the gospel. The books have pushed me to listen harder, seek growth in community, and find ways to bear fruit in my roles as a father, husband, friend, and teacher. In short, the books have given me reasons to serve and persevere: to confront the places in myself and others that most needs God’s help and what I can practically do to extend God’s care in love and faith.

One measure for me of that renewed commitment to service and perseverance is this blog—not just this site but this actual blog. It’s 9:20pm, and I’m long past being focused enough to offer substantive and constructive feedback on the 30+ papers I need to grade over the next few days.

I am trying. This is not an essay or extended argument, but it is an effort to think with a passage from my daily reading that spoke to me.

If you are familiar with the Thyatira sermon from Revelation 2, then you know the above verse is just a warm-up to the extended criticism of Jezebel and her relationship with the church. That is worth its own deep engagement.

For my purposes here, I singled out verse 19 which intrigues me because of:

  1. God’s attention to the church’s actions
  2. In particular, the attention to “love and faith” which are signs of compassion and reliance borne out in serving and doing so in the face of obstacles
  3. and the progress Thyatria has made in that service and perseverance

In the midst of revision and the inevitable pain that comes with knowing you didn’t get it right the first time, we find that iif we work in love and faith, God will complete the good work He began in us.

I pray for a commitment to daily writing and teaching, for those practices to be grounded in love (service to others) and faith (an allegiance to God), and the fruit from those practices to grow over time.

 

Knowing Peace

John 14:27 “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.”

A short list of things I could be troubled about on the 10 of October in the year of our Lord 2018…

  1. Another hurricane hurtling toward South Carolina
  2. Enrollment woes at not just my university but many universities and the job anxiety and pressure that attend those flagging numbers
  3. Students who have stopped coming to class
  4. A cancerous tumor in my wife’s aunt’s brain
  5. Flagging membership and participation at 200-year-old churches
  6. The brouhaha in SCOTUS nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings as well as his eventual confirmation
  7. My caterwauling 3-year-old daughter

I love the verse from John because it identifies something I forget: that the world offers peace too. It is an ersatz peace, however, built on something that will not last or built on the fact that there is no peace that lasts.

Christ show us, however, that peace is acceptance, not passivity; it comes from the ability to recognize God’s hand in the storm, not just in its absence or its abatement.  God teaches us in the present not so that our learning will end but so that we will trust him when we inevitably reach the edge of what we know. I don’t know what items lurk in my future that will make the seven items above seem like child’s play. When I am focused on God, I realize that this doesn’t matter, that tomorrow will take care of itself. Peace does not preclude fear but it robs it of its sting by giving us a taste of eternity in the here and now.

Splitting Terror

Job 23:16 “God has made my heart faint; the Almighty has terrified me.”

When was the last time I admitted something like the verse above? When was the last time this was true for me?

Yesterday, our minister preached on II Samuel 12 and David’s sin with Bathsheba and Uriah. He made a passing comment about these events being the darkest chapter in David’s kingly career.

My mind immediately went to II Samuel 24 where David’s rash census-taking cost 70,000 people their lives. The passage is all the more problematic because in verse 1, we read, “Again the anger of the Lord burned against Israel, and he incited David against them, saying, ‘Go and take a census of Israel and Judah.’” A parallel passage, I Chronicles 21:1, on the other hand, says, “Satan rose up against Israel and incited David to take a census of Israel.”

Leaving aside the contradiction and assuming the harmonic interpretation, the entire story is faint-inducing and terrifying.

Today in class, I taught my students about lumping and splitting. Both are means of categorizing the world, of sorting the innumerable bits of data we confront into tidier categories. Lumping, however, only uses existing categories. There’s a reason for this kind of categorization, and life without lumping is, frankly, impossible. But it’s also a refuge from the storm of thought and too often leads us to compromise our characters and discipline in the name of “facts.”

In my effort to find a passage from the Bible each day that’s simple to apply, I tend to lump my verses into two categories: personally edifying or not. If it’s not, I don’t highlight or meditate on it. I move on.

As a result, I never really engage with the nitty, gritty details of God’s word, which is (according to Hebrews 4:12) capable of its own kind of splitting. It helps create categories that were not there before, exposes nuances to me that I had covered over, and invites me to occasionally faint and be terrified at the image of God that emerges from such nuances.

I want to find spaces where God can allow me to hear the truth, even the truth of Job and the passage in II Samuel. If these passages contain something I need to know about God, then I want to see them and have my lumped view of God split.

Lord, have mercy.

Washing Feet

John 13:14 “Now that I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another’s feet.”

What is our culture’s equivalent of washing someone’s feet? What is the educational version of that act of service?

Christ speaks to me as a teacher in this verse. He has just demonstrated his willingness to make himself vulnerable in caring for them, and now he calls on them to do the same.

Today in class, we read a sample essay that responded to the prompt my students are currently working on. It was one of those drafts that appeared solid on the surface, and for a rough draft, it really was promising. It featured motivated research, a clear thesis, decent organization, and some really compelling information about dormitory visitation policies.

The more closely we looked at it though, the more flaws appeared. The research didn’t really bear on the project, and so many citations were missing that the author’s authority was shot by the end of the second paragraph. The essay is supposed to be a report, but it turned into an argument at its end, and by the time I was done discussing it, it seemed like the paper was awful.

So what do we do with that?

Well, in class, I left them to start their own research, and it seemed to me the sample essay now felt like a cautionary tale.

But was it?

Well, I would thank God if my students came up with that draft by the end of next week. They would have two weeks to work on the revision, and they might up come up with something really special.

And as I sit here writing this, I know that what I need to do for this particular sample is write the revision. I need to do the work and offer it to my students on Monday as an example of what they can do. Our discussion will come out of those improvements.

I can’t write a revision for everyone, just as Christ could not wash the feet of everyone in Jerusalem.

But I can wash the feet of this particular essay, and from that attitude of service I can call my students to begin the process of washing one another’s feet and helping each other become better readers and writers.