Mark Warnock, Editor of SSG.com

I began this website in December of 2007 as a way to give counsel to seminary students from a vantage point outside seminary. Now, I have returned to seminary, this time as a Ph.D student. I just completed my first semester toward a Ph.D in Christian Philosophy at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.

The primary reason I’m returning to seminary is to sharpen my ability to think, write and teach. After 15 years of full-time ministry in the local church, I’ve found I’ve settled into a mental slump. The day to day life of local church ministry hasn’t kept me as intellectually stretched and sharpened as I should be. To paraphrase Paul, I’ve been neglecting my gifts. Time to fan them into flame again.

So I hope to write here some fresh material on the seminary experience, this time from the perspective of a doctoral student. I hope to see the seminary environment with fresh eyes, and have productive and helpful things to say. This time, however, I will have the joy of taking my own advice!

Thanks to all of you who have followed this modest little project called Seminary Survival Guide, and who have commented and participated along the way. Some of you may be new to our conversation: welcome! Please make our discussion richer by contributing your own thoughts and insights.

Also, I’m open to guest posts, if you think you might have something edifying and practical to share with seminary students. You can query me at mark (at) seminary survival guide.com.

Next week I’ll post some reflections on time management, based on my first semester of doing Ph.D study and maintaining a full-time ministry position.

The first week of seminary is over, and looming ahead are due dates for reading, papers and tests. You know this because you should have a syllabus for each class, which contains all the assignments you’ll need to complete this semester and their due dates.

This is awesome. It’s a time management bonanza. If you take a few moments to plan well, it can make the semester much easier for you. Carpe Diem!

Here’s what you need to do:

1. Get your calendar. You should have only one calendar, because you have only one life. (Be sure you coordinate well with your spouse and kids.)

2. Note all the dates of your papers and exams.

3. To the best of your ability keep your schedule clear in the week before each exam, and two weeks before each paper due date

4. Schedule recovery time. Be sure to schedule some down time right after mid-terms, and after big assignments are due. Plan to relax a bit. If you schedule a day trip, a date, or some fun activity just after the crunch, it will give you something to look forward to after the big project.

5. Make a note of when the worst crunch times are. Then, if your job allows for any scheduling leeway, let your boss know early. If you’re a valuable employee, she just might work with you.

Following these suggestions should only take an hour or two, and should save you time and frustration all semester long.

(From the archives.)

The true reasons people go into ministry are manifold.  We’ve written at length about the need for divine calling.  But not surprisingly, there are human factors as well.

One major human factor that is widely unacknowledged is personal brokenness.  I’ve never met anyone in ministry who didn’t have some level of emotional wounding in their lives.  In Henri Nouwen’s words, we are “wounded healers.”

There is an upside and a downside to this.  Emotional wounds make us more sensitive to and responsive to the working of God in our lives.  Like Jacob, the wound causes us to stop wrestling and start clinging (Genesis 32).  Properly acknowledged and brought to the feet of Christ, our hurt can be a great vehicle for blessing to others (2 Corinthians 1).

These wounds come in many shapes and sizes. Here are some I’ve seen:

• Strained relationships with parents, especially those who are physically or emotionally absent
• Alcohol or drug abuse, in us or our families
• Traumatic experience
• Early or unexpected loss of a close friend or relative
• Sexual abuse
• Experiences of rejection, isolation or loneliness
• Some other addictive habit or besetting sin
• Physical handicaps

This list is not exhaustive, obviously.  We could add more to the list.  My first question I would pose to you is: what is the primary place of brokenness in you?

It’s possible that some of you will read this and say “This must be wrong, because nothing like this has happened to me.”  Maybe not.  It is possible that you are in denial, but I’m content to admit that you may be a happy exception to the rule.

But for the rest of us, whom I’m convinced are in the majority, it is critical to the success of our ministries that we learn to be stewards of our brokenness.

Brokenness has a couple of snares.  First of all, the same emotional need that drives us to God can easily drive us to sin.  The temptation is to find quick satisfaction and relief from pain in a forbidden distraction.  Many people in ministry flip back and forth between pursuing their healing in Christ, and pursuing some relief in alcohol, pornography, relational dependency, or escapism of other kinds. Unchecked by healthy accountability, this snare can easily lead to moral failure and an ignominious end to your ministry.

The second snare is far more pernicious.  It is very possible to be driven to Christ by your emotional wounds, and then fail to fully acknowledge and address them and apply to gospel to them.  Ministry can become a cloak to hide behind.  When our wounds are not properly acknowledged and addressed, they will fester, turn poisonous, and seep out everywhere.  There are plenty of people like this in the church and in ministry, who are inadvertently damaging the church.

I remember the first time I recognized this.  I knew two individuals in one church whose passion for the Lord was very apparent.  Casual visitors to their church would have said that these two were the most spiritual people in the congregation.  One was a man who was deeply committed to prayer, ready to serve, and always very enthusiastic.  As I got to know him I discovered that his prayerfulness was a cloak for a massive spiritual pride-entirely unacknowledged by him-that annoyed his wife and drove his children away from Christ.

Another was a woman-passionate, eager, hard-working, and idealistic.  Her fervor covered a deep father-wound that came out in manipulation, undermining authority, and a need for control that bordered on insanity.  These two people, who on the surface appeared most spiritually together, were in reality the most emotionally messed up people in that church. Their loud display of commitment to Christ was not sufficient to counteract the bitter poison of an untreated wound.

I heard this week about an associate pastor whose insecurity and control issues are about to cost him his job-for the third or fourth time.  If we are to have an enduring ministry, we must steward our brokenness well.

The gospel of the love of Christ is the ultimate solution to our emotional wounds and our proclivity to sin.  Stewarding our brokenness means

• Fully acknowledging our wounds
• Pursuing our healing and satisfaction in Christ
• Submitting to regular accountability in healthy community

A few questions:

• How are you emotionally wounded, and how does it affect you?
• How are you pursuing your healing in Christ?
• Who is asking you about it on a regular basis?

It’s important that we come to clear and definite answers on these questions.

Triage (`tree-ozh), from French, “to sort.”

1. A process for sorting injured people into groups based on their need for or likely benefit from immediate medical treatment. Triage is used in hospital emergency rooms, on battlefields, and at disaster sites when limited medical resources must be allocated.

2. A system used to allocate a scarce commodity, such as food, only to those capable of deriving the greatest benefit from it.

3. A process in which things are ranked in terms of importance or priority. (From The American Heritage Dictionary)

Here’s our first piece of wisdom. You might want to write this down and put it on your bathroom mirror:

You can’t do everything.

There’s no way for you to work all the hours to get all the money you need, AND make straight “A”s in school, AND maintain an intimate walk with God, AND pour yourself out in fruitful ministry, AND develop an impressive resume, AND see to the needs of your spouse and family, AND develop a network of friendships to support you AND get the rest, exercise and proper nutrition you need.

It’s just not possible. The time and energy demands for each of these endeavors is much too great for one person. So please give up on this now. It is a pipe dream. If you are a perfectionist, read the last paragraph again.

What we must decide is what to say no to. Since you can’t do everything, there are some things that simply will not get the attention they need. The earlier you reconcile yourself to that raw fact, the better off you’ll be.

Learning to Say Yes, No, and Wait.
Ever been to an emergency room on a Friday night? The waiting area is often crammed with injured, sometimes bleeding, people. Why are they there? Can’t they get any service?

If you are injured and go to an emergency room, your first stop will be to see the triage nurse. He or she will quickly evaluate you and decide how urgent your condition is. This will determine when you receive treatment. If you are about to die, you’ll probably be seen immediately. If your injuries are not life-threatening, however, be prepared to wait. It’s not unusual for some people to wait in the emergency room for 8 hours to be seen, while others are whisked back and are seen in minutes. It’s not a fair system at all.

Compare this to a customer service call center. While you’re on hold, the recorded message tells you that “your call will be answered in the order in which it was received.” Or, compare it to the customer service counter in a department store. There’s a line. The next person in line gets served. It’s fair. Everyone gets treated equally.

The triage nurse is generally not a popular person with people in the waiting room. But it is her job to attend to the most important things first. She is responsible to see that the hospital’s resources are managed so that lives are saved. If emergency rooms were like customer service centers—first-come, first-served—then people would be dying of heart attacks in the waiting room as the doctors give their attention to cuts and scrapes. Triage is an unpopular, but critically important task.

You need to manage your life like an emergency room, not a customer service center. You need to learn to tell people to sit and wait. You need to learn to practice triage with time, tasks and relationships.This will take some toughness and determination. If you are a wuss about this, and say yes to everything, you might as well give up now. You are a sure candidate for burning out. Better to quit while you still have your soul intact.

But if you’re serious about ministry, it’s important that you learn triage early. Because once you’re out of seminary, life in ministry is the same. There are always more people to see and tasks to perform than you have time for. You will practice triage or you will burn out.

Try This
Try this idea, borrowed from Tim Ferriss’ Four Hour Work Week. For two days, say no to every request you receive, no matter how large or small. (Exceptions for God, spouse and boss permitted…although even the boss needs to be told no occasionally.)

“Can you help me bring in this box?” No.
“Do you have a second?” No.
“We’re having a party and…” No.

What is this, cruelty? No. Saying no is a good habit to develop, because it requires guts.If you’re gutless, start telling people no. Remember: you’re not doing it to be a jerk, you’re doing it so you can say yes to the important things.

Try it. Let me know how it goes.

(Reprinted from the archives)

In an interview with the dean of students at a leading evangelical seminary, I asked about the most common reasons people did not complete seminary.  One of his answers was a shock to me: students get caught cheating.

Seminary students have ample opportunity to cheat.

• You can plagiarize—representing the academic work of others as your own.  You can rip off fellow students, sometimes with their cooperation.  You can rip off published scholars through failure to provide necessary citations in your written work.
• You can use forbidden resources on exams.  Conjugations written on the palm of your hand?  Ever have a take-home, closed-book exam?  (Only at seminary!)
• You can dishonestly answer those dratted blanket questions on your final, like:
  • Did you read all of your required readings?
  • Did you complete the special assignment?

Seminaries tend to be more trusting with academic honor codes than their secular counterparts.  They put great stock in the work of the Holy Spirit to convict students of sin, and rest confidently in that as a bulwark.  But students still cheat.  No one knows how much, but I suspect if we did, we would be embarrassed.

The spiritual roots of cheating

My systematic theology professor taught us that all sins boiled down to either pride or sloth.  Cheating is no different.  Let’s think deeply about this: why would you cheat?

Pride

• You’re afraid you cannot pass seminary on your own, and would be ashamed to be found out as academically incapable.
• You believe that the grade you make in class is an evaluation of you, not just your performance, and feel the need to inflate it.
• Making a poor grade is unthinkable, so since you’re busy, you take a few shortcuts.
• Since you’re capable of making an “A” anyway, why should you be forced to work to prove it?
• Who will know?  It doesn’t matter anyway.

The common factor in these is pride.

To derail pride:

• The antidote to pride is humility.
• Humility is always chosen.  It is never accidental.
• Humility is a choice only you can make.  God won’t make you humble.  His word clearly teaches that we are to humble ourselves. “Humble yourselves in the sight of he Lord, and he will lift you up.”
• “God opposes the proud.”  If you’ve rationalized your cheating out of pride, consider this: Almighty God stands in eternal opposition to your inflated thoughts of yourself.
• “…but gives grace to the humble.”  There is an unending cascade of grace for those who choose humility.  Trust in that future grace.

If you make a “D” in Biblical backgrounds, that doesn’t mean you’re not called of God.

If you fail a test, it doesn’t mean you are a failure.

If your professor thinks poorly of you, that doesn’t mean that God does.

Humility, as I understand it, means taking God’s view of us as the true and correct view.  This encompasses both the horror of our capacity for sin, and the splendor of the gifts and nobility God has put within us.

We need to have the courage to face the truth about ourselves.  We can only do that by being secure in the love and favor of God in Christ.  If I know I am deeply loved and approved by God in Christ, then I can handle making a “C”.

Sloth

The other major root of cheating is laziness—raw unwillingness to exert effort.  You don’t want to do the work, so cheating is a shortcut.  You cheat not to protect your image of reputation, but simply out of indolence.

Much like pride, sloth is characterized by rationalizations.  We are never so creative as when we’re trying to come up with reasons to avoid work.  A lazy person will say or believe anything to justify avoidance of exertion.

The effort we’re willing to expend in service to God reflects our view of His greatness.  If Almighty God in all his glory, power and love can’t motivate you to a bit of work and self-denial, then something is seriously wrong.  You may need to check your conversion.

If you’ve cheated:

Repent. In the most literal sense, you need to change your mind about it.  Your dishonesty is an offense against the God of truth.  Be done with your rationalizations, and acknowledge your sin.

Come Clean. Do this first with a pastor or trusted spiritual advisor; the more mature, the better.  Confession is never fun but is cleansing to the soul.  Second, come clean with your professor, even if the class is already over.  Go to him or her, tell exactly what you did, and submit to whatever instructions you’re given.

Find the root. What motivated you to cheat in the first place?  Find out.  Don’t assume that the first answer you come up with off the top of your head is correct, either. This kind of issue is best talked through with a counselor or perceptive spiritual director.  Most seminaries have free counseling for students.  Go sign up.

Walk in the light. Don’t do it anymore.  Study hard, do your best, and accept whatever grade you get with grace.  Write your own papers.  Cite all borrowed material, even if you have to lug back to the library to get the page number.  Enjoy the sweet fruit of a clean conscience.

Final Warning

If you’re willing to cheat in seminary, you’ll cheat when you’re ministering in a church.  You’ll eventually be found out, and it will damage the church and the cause of Christ.  When it makes the papers, you will drive lost people away from the gospel.  The choices you make in the privacy of your head have eternal repercussions that you cannot fathom.  Resolve now to live with integrity, no matter what it costs you.

A week before Christmas, after six long years of study, I graduated from seminary.  Looking back, I’ve had a lot of thoughts, questions, comments, and recommendations, so I thought that organizing some of them would be helpful both for me and for past, present, and future seminarians.  (Since it took me six years to finish, this could be quite a long post.)

What a Good Seminary Is

• A Place to Begin Learning “Book Knowledge.” Few places amass the amount of biblical “book knowledge” – in classes and in print – that a seminary has to offer.  Used rightly, seminary can whet your taste for deeper studies.
• A Time to Begin Studying Harder. Let’s be honest – most of us don’t naturally think too deeply about Christ and His Lordship over all of life until someone prods us to do so.  Seminary could be a good place to begin this lifelong practice.
• A Venue to Begin Asking Hard Questions. Whether spoken in class, written down for further study, or discussed with friends, good questions are often the offspring of seminary studies.  Again, however, seminary can just be one of many starting places of what must be a lifelong practice for the Christian – asking and answering the hardest of questions.
• A Good Place to Begin Learning Hebrew and Greek. There truly is no substitute for time spent in class learning Hebrew and Greek.  Can it be done on your own? Yes.  Is it much harder than just going to class? No question.  Imagine having a world-class biblical language scholar to teach you Greek.  Would you pass that up for just a book?
• A Good Assembly of Mature Biblical Scholars. There are many places in the world in which you couldn’t find these kind of scholars for hundreds, possibly thousands of miles, so to have them all in one place is truly a blessing of God.

What Seminary Is Not

• Your Local Church. Too many students still come to seminary and try to find their deepest fellowship between other students and professors.  Too many students still come and waste time trying to find “just the right fit” at a local church.  Not to be harsh, but just go and find a good one, get joined to that body, and watch God work in lives.  It doesn’t happen at seminary, because seminary is not the local church.
• Your Ticket into the Gospel Ministry. To dispel another rumor, just because you have your M.Div. doesn’t mean that churches will come out of the woodwork to offer you multiple jobs.  The gospel ministry isn’t a job anyway – it’s the highest and holiest calling from God.  Your local church should be doing the calling, equipping, and sending.
• The Only Place to Learn, Study, and Ask Hard Questions. There are many other ways to learn and practice deep, difficult, delightful study in a community of learners, and the foremost of which is your local church.  The discussions I’ve had with 2 or 3 brothers around a table at Bojangle’s dwarf seminary discussions by a longshot.
• The Only Way to Learn the Languages. Again, if your church has someone gifted by God in Hebrew and/or Greek, he and your church can offer you many advantages over learning the languages in seminary.  Of course, you can learn the languages and still keep your learning plugged in to your church, but you may find it easier to do it all in one context.
• The Only Available Assembly of Mature Biblical Scholars. You never know until you look, but your local church may have more mature, more fatherly biblical scholars in it than your local seminary.  And it may even be that these men already know you better, and you them, than could ever happen in a seminary setting.  Count this a blessing.  Utilize the library and the bookstore, too, since their shelves should be full of biblical scholars, both alive and dead.  Read them and discuss them with your church.
• Necessary. Loving your wife and children is absolutely necessary; the seminary is not. The local church is absolutely necessary; the seminary is not.  Loving the lost peoples of the world is absolutely necessary; seminary is not.  Getting further training for the gospel ministry is necessary, but seminary isn’t the only way to do it.  In fact, the local church can be far better.

Questions to Ask Yourself (and Your Wife):

1. How will seminary serve to increase happiness in Christ for me, my wife and children, my local church, my neighbors, and the peoples of the world? Do I think about this time of study and learning as working more joy, so that it may then flow out from me into others, or is it just to puff my head up?
2. Why do I want to go to seminary? What is my goal?  Is it to love Jesus more, or to get another credential to put on my business card?
3. What do I expect to learn at seminary? Do my expectations line up with reality?  Does this school even teach what I want to learn?
4. What is my plan for starting, working through it, and finishing? If I don’t have one, am I okay with that?  Will I be okay going for six years instead of three?

Questions to Ask of Your Church Family:

1. How has God gifted me to love and serve others? In what ways has God created and grown me to love people in our church well?  Are there any supposed giftings in which I may be deceiving myself?
2. Do you see God’s grace at work to send me to seminary? If so, how so?  If not, why not?  Over what changes in my life should I pray for God’s help?
3. Do you see God’s grace at work to sustain me through seminary? This isn’t a question of “Can God sustain me through it?” but rather, “Is seminary the best idea for me right now, considering my life situation?”  Many of us falter at this question.

Questions to Ask of Your Seminary:

1. What are their basic beliefs? Closely consult their statement of faith.  Doctrines like the Trinity, Christ’s humanity and divinity, the sufficiency and authority of Scripture, the perfect saving work of Christ, the doctrine of salvation by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone to the glory of God alone, the primacy of the local church, and the importance of the family – to name just a few – are non-negotiables.
2. Do they understand the gospel of Christ? When the gospel is preached at this seminary, is it more about man’s duty or God’s finished work on the cross?  When the ministry is discussed here, is it more about man’s clever designs or about God’s gloriously good news?
3. What classes and types of classes are emphasized? This is easy to learn by simply looking at the required curriculum.  Many seminaries require classes and sections of classes that are superfluous and peripheral to the gospel ministry.  Does this seminary require you to take needless classes?  If so, are you prepared to deal with them and learn anyway?

Finally, if you, your wife, and your church family decide that seminary is the best option for you, here are two categories of recommendations.

Life Recommendations:

1. Get and stay deeply immersed in the Word of God and prayer. Not only is the Bible for study and for teaching, it is for all of our life our only source of pure truth, our only kindling for pure joy, our only testimony of the perfect Christ, and the only source of the glorious good news.  It is easy to treat the Bible as a teaching tool; remember to approach it more often for your own enjoyment, faith, hope, love, and satisfaction in God.  Only humility and prayer can do this.
2. Get and stay tightly woven into your local church during seminary. I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again – there is no way to live, eat, or breathe Christ for very long without the local church.  This doesn’t mean you need a building; it means you need Christians in and through and around your life, holding you up in prayer and loving you and being loved by you.  Don’t think of them as a checklist during seminary; think of them as family.
3. Start killing and continue to kill sin by the Holy Spirit. The absence of the first two – communion with God in the Word and in the church – often creates a terrible situation with sin.  Instead of being a time of growth in holiness for life, seminary can often be a time of growing, cancerous sin for death.  Get serious about murdering your own flesh.
4. Get and keep your priorities straight. Don’t put seminary first.  Never put seminary first.  There is no conceivable life situation in which seminary comes first.  As one of my pastors said, “Your priorities are in order when each priority honors the one above it.”  This means that if school comes before wife, you’ve got it very wrong.

Class Recommendations

1. “Find out who the best professors are and take only them.  Professors can make or break your seminary experience.” This advice was given to me by my college pastor, and it may have been the best piece of class-taking advice I received.  You can’t always keep it – things like scheduling, time, and work may get in the way – but, as much as possible, try to take only the best professors.
2. Find others who’ve gone before you. Ask them who the best professors are.  Ask them what each professor believes and why his class is “good” or “not good.”  See if these observations line up with Scripture.
3. Love the languages. Luther may have put it best when he said that the languages are the sheath from which we pull out God’s Holy Sword – the Word.  Too many seminarians think that they’ll just “get Hebrew and Greek out of the way” and forget that the Christian ministry is fundamentally one of preaching the gospel of God’s Son straight out of God’s Word (Acts 6:2-4, Acts 20:27, Romans 10:17, 1 Corinthians 1:17, Galatians 3:2-5, etc.).

Britt Treece is a new graduate of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, North Carolina. He blogs at http://crossonmyback.wordpress.com.

I grew up in South Florida. I was a native Floridian, which was pretty unusual. In my 9th grade class of 30 students, for instance, only two of us were actually born in Florida. The rest were transplants. Consequently, there wasn’t much of a unique Floridian cultural identity. Mix the Old South, Yankee transplants, immigrants from Mexico & the islands… it was a mish-mash culture, and not a particular source of pride for any of us.

Then I got to Texas. Sweet Moses, was it different! Texas pride-which I still fail to fully understand-was everywhere.

• “Everything’s bigger in Texas.”
• “Everything’s better in Texas.”
• “Texas is the best.”
• “I [heart] Texas.”

Everywhere you turned, there was this rampant Texas nationalism. I wasn’t really offended by it… I just didn’t get it. I looked around and thought to myself, “Yeah, this is nice and all, but c’mon, people.”

One of my Texas friends, a 300 pound air conditioning repairman, said to me once, (just imagine the accent):

“I don’t know why anyone would want to live anywhere else but Texas. Everything you want’s right here.”

I asked him, “Have you ever been anywhere else?”

He replied, “Well, I went to Arkansas once.”

Now, this is not meant to be an anti-Texas screed; I actually really enjoyed my time there. My point is that moving to seminary means moving. It means, in most cases, a different place with a different culture.

Now the consolation, for many, is that the move is temporary. In most cases, you’re not going to settle down and live there at seminary forever, though I’m sure that happens occasionally.

It was interesting to me to see how people responded to the (temporary) culture shift. There was a significant group of people-usually married-that did not really settle into living in Texas. Most notably, they didn’t make friends while they were there. They seemed to keep all their relationships intentionally superficial.

The attitude was: “I don’t like it here, but I’m living here because I have to. So I’m just going to bide my time for (insert timeline; 2-3 years) until I can go back home where people are (insert attitude: better, normal, smarter, etc.).” In my observation, it was more often not the seminary student with this attitude, but his or her spouse.

(I’m curious, incidentally, if that was just unique to my experience, or if students in other places see this happening. I’ll look for your comments below.)

So this brings me to this word of exhortation: while you’re at living at seminary, live! It may not be home for you, but your real home is in heaven anyway. (Philippians 3:20) Even in your hometown, you should be living as a stranger and an alien (1 Peter 2:11)

The exiles from Jerusalem didn’t enjoy living in Babylon (see for example Psalm 137!), but the command to them in Jeremiah 29 was to settle down, build houses and gardens, start families. In other words, live!

According to the scriptures, God “determines the times set for us and the exact places that we should live.” And he does this, the scriptures say, “so that men will reach out for him and perhaps find him.” I understand that to mean that as an agent of God’s kingdom, wherever I’m living, there are people God sovereignly puts in my relational sphere so I can influence them for His purposes, and vice versa.

So live while you’re at seminary. Settle into the local culture. Do all the things you would do to have a normal life… including making friends.

Boy was I surprised. My first semester, I enrolled in Hebrew class, like many beginning M.Div.-ers. I made friends with some other young single guys in the class, and we got together to study. I lived off campus, but they lived in the men’s dorm on campus, so I went over and hung out with them.

One day a group of us got in a conversation about scriptural interpretation. A prominent church leader had shared (in chapel I think) how he had made a major life decision based on a particular verse of scripture…and by the rules we were studying at the time, we agreed that he’d not interpreted the scripture correctly. So we were batting that around.

Somewhere in that conversation one of the guys made a remark I’ll never forget. He said, “Interpreting the Bible properly is so difficult and such hard work, that I don’t even bother to read my Bible devotionally any more.”

This gave me pause. I asked for clarification. I got way more.

I agreed with him about the challenges of proper interpretation, but then I asked him, “You mean to tell me that Farmer Jones out in East Texas can’t sit down with his Bible and his morning coffee, pray that God will speak to him through it and expect reliably to hear from God?”

He said, “No, that’s not possible.”

He went on to say that God could speak just as well through the “funnies” in the newspaper as he could through the Bible.

Wow.

So I chalked it up to him being one of those weird students that you’re bound to run into anywhere. I found out he went to one of the loopier, left-leaning churches in the area, so I figured he was an exception, a little nutty. I’m still pretty sure I was right about this.

But after a while, the others left the room, and I was talking with another friend, one more stable, more normal, more conservative, more in the mainstream of what I considered seminary students to be. The kind of guy you’d want to be on church staff with you.

I was bemoaning the weird guy’s (I thought) abandonment of God, and he said, “Well, to be honest with you, I don’t read my Bible devotionally either.”

He paused.

“And neither does John, or Keith, or….” He went on to name about six guys from his floor that he knew for a fact had abandoned daily time in prayer and in the scriptures.

I was amazed. We talked more. He had been very faithful in personal devotion in college, but somehow just stopped.

These guys, in this atmosphere of saturation of study of the word of God, had abandoned a devotional pursuit of God. They started studying God and stopped loving Him.

I went on to discover that this is very common among seminary students. In all honesty, I struggled very much with this during seminary. By God’s mercy, I managed to keep my habits of prayer maintained, but seminary was a dry and difficult time.

Philosophical riff:

It reminded me of C. S. Lewis’ lament in The Abolition of Man
that the modern world produces men without chests: heavy on reason (the head) and heavy on animal appetites(the belly) but without sentiment (the chest), that ennobling blend of emotion and truth that warms the aridity of cold reason and ennobles the raw impulses of the body. The head, reason, makes us like God; the belly, our appetites, make us like animals. The chest is the mediator that brings them together and makes us really human.

It’s no accident that the greatest commandment is to love the Lord our God. The basic duty of man to the Lord is worship: an activity of the chest—of the heart—if ever there was one.

The modern man, Lewis said, has a big head and no chest. So apparently, did some of my fellow seminarians.

Conclusion:

Seminary is a dry time for devotion. The easy way out is to blame the seminary: the modern institution produces modern men. I don’t buy it. You and I are responsible for our own growth. In the midst of all your study, be sure you are loving God well.

It’s pretty simple:

• Reserve study blocks beginning about a week before the exam.
• Plan for multiple, short study times rather than longer blocks. Four blocks of 20 minutes each will probably make for better retention than a single two-hour marathon review.
• Reserve this time now, and plan around it.

If you have multiple exams in a single week, like around mid-terms or finals:

• Start a bit earlier.
• Schedule breaks in your study time. You can schedule shorter blocks of study time around other activities, or simply build a ten minute break into each hour of studying.

The point? Be proactive. (This is Habit #1 in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.) If you anticipate your needs ahead of time and provide for them, you won’t have to be reactive and frustrated at exam time.

Also consider these study ideas:

• Swap class notes with someone and read over your friend’s notes. This will help refresh your memory of lectures and pick up things you might have missed.
• If you’ve underlined and/or highlighted your class reading well, it should be relatively easy to review what you’ve read.
• Get a friend to quiz you on points you’ll be tested on. Iron sharpens iron, and it’s a good excuse to get coffee.

This is awesome. It’s a time management bonanza. If you take a few moments to plan well, it can make the semester much easier for you. Carpe Diem!

Here’s what you need to do:

1. Get your calendar. You should have only one calendar, because you have only one life. (Be sure you coordinate well with your spouse and kids.)

2. Note all the dates of your papers and exams.

3. To the best of your ability keep your schedule clear in the week before each exam, and two weeks before each paper due date

4. Schedule recovery time. Be sure to schedule some down time right after mid-terms, and after big assignments are due. Plan to relax a bit. If you schedule a day trip, a date, or some fun activity just after the crunch, it will give you something to look forward to after the big project.

5. Make a note of when the worst crunch times are. Then, if your job allows for any scheduling leeway, let your boss know early. If you’re a valuable employee, she just might work with you.

Following these suggestions should only take an hour or two, and should save you time and frustration all semester long.