Education is one of those wonderful experiences of life. I have been on the college campus now for almost 20 years, not nearly as many years as a number of my colleagues, but enough to teach me a few things. One of the comments I hear regularly from graduates is that college was a defining moment in their lives. It was not the easiest time, but it was the period of time in their life when they matured the most. I feel such a sense of satisfaction to be a part of that time.

In choosing to take on the mantel of education you receive a great blessing, but in a very real way you also take on a curse. The blessing of education is that you are exposed to many different ways of thinking that broaden your perspective on life. Your former ways of thinking are discarded, modified, or strengthened; in each case you change for the better. Then there is the curse. In the process of your education you also begin to see that you had solved some of life's problems far to easily. You find that the simplest answers don’t always explain everything and sometimes the most complicated solutions are best. The world is not black and white anymore; it is multicolored, which makes it more beautiful but at the same time more complicated. You realize that truth can be found in places where many will not look and some don't think you should. You see that you can’t give too much of your mind to God and that worship is something that happens in the library as well as in church. You also find out how much you didn’t know and realize that college is not going to prepare you for everything; it only pushes you in the right direction. There is so much more to do!

For me personally I found that college confused as well as clarified issues in my life. Being interested in theology I think I was more certain of what I believed when I entered college than when I left. I found it distressing when filling out an application for ministerial credentialing that I was given a yes and no box to indicate my beliefs on doctrinal issues that theologians had debated for centuries. It just wasn’t adequate! In college I realized that some of the people I used to think were totally wrong really had a lot of good things to say. The curse was that when I would suggest those areas where they might be right, some would lump me in whole with them and occasionally reject my views entirely. One of my favorite things about Fuller Seminary was that it was a place where things like that didn’t happen.

I love the academic world, I cannot think of ever being anywhere else. Even with its curse, it is truly a great blessing.

Posted by Dwight at 7:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I have had the flu for the last two weeks. The strain going around this year is a whopper: terrible muscle ache, headache, cough, fever, weakness.... I just started getting better when it hit me again for another week. I am feeling a little better now, but it did not let hold of me easily. It sort hung on a long as it could making me miserable. If you ever needed a reason to believe in evil, the flu is it. It is the embodiment of evil. What purpose could it possibly have other than making people miserable? The flu delights in the pain of others, it does not know of things like family, friends and happiness. It only lives to do wrong; I hate it. I know there are those who would say that the flu is only doing what the flu does; there are no malicious intentions whatsoever. If you say that, then you are also evil;) That's all I have to say about that.

It's Spring Break this week and I am trying to get caught up on all the stuff I have let go. One major hurdle . . . taxes. This year is a mess. I typically do them myself on the computer, but this year with the sale of our house I am wondering if I am in over my head. Doing your own taxes is a yearly exercise that challenges one's integrity in the area that can hurt the most, your pocketbook. There are so many ways to cheat! Add a little here; take off a little there, and in the end you save yourself hundreds. Those computer programs are great for this because the benefit of those little tweaks can be seen immediately on your screen. There is nothing more painful than inserting the correct numbers and taking it on the chin. The benefit is that it allows you to go bed at night with a clear conscience; that's worth a lot more than a few hundred bucks.

While I'm on the wonderful subject of cheating, I have never gone a semester of teaching without having to deal with it in the classroom. In earlier years I used to let people save face. Somewhere along the line it hit me that I was not doing anyone a favor by not having them face their problem. People face their own breaches of integrity in different ways. I have presented irrefutable evidence of cheating to students only to have them lash out at me with intense anger. On one occasion, with finger pointed in my face, a student blurted "how dare you embarrass me like this!" At other times I see brokenness and humility, and the desire to make things right. I have come to the conclusion that situations like this are really God's way of showing his grace. I often tell people who have "been caught" that what they are seeing is God's marvelous grace in their lives. If God didn't care, he would have let the situation go on forever. Instead he let's people get caught so that they can deal with the character issue now. Any pain someone in their twenties has to face in dealing with ethical and moral issues does not hold a candle to the pain that will be faced in dealing with the same character issues twenty year later. Sure, there is embarrassment but you probably won't loose your family or career in your early twenties, you may well later. Sometimes God lets people get caught just because he loves them so much.

Posted by Dwight at 8:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)