Sometimes we make unconventional choices, ones that do not seem to make much sense in terms of our welfare in the world.
Today is one of those days. I had a chance to redeem myself of a rather abysmal grade on an Old Testament exegetical paper. I decided to drop the ball. Not only had I run out of time, but my resources were unavailable to me. These factors alone made it very difficult to follow through, but at the core of this conundrum lay that pesky thing called "will." You just couldn’t drag it out of me.
Unfortunately, there will likely be a very ugly grade on my transcript now. I can’t call my professor merciless. Ultimately, she was extremely fair and gracious in offering me the opportunity for a do-over. But the real point remains: I didn’t get it, and I didn’t want to. Don’t get me wrong. It was arguably the most engaging, fantastic course of the year. But in all honesty, I remain just as bored by the Old Testament as I was sitting in mother’s third grade Sunday School class some 44 years ago.
Maybe something’s wrong with me. When reading historical accounts, I like my fare to be as accurate and close to reality as possible. I love verismo opera, for instance. I do NOT like " maybe" in history OR in life, and find conjecture a wholesale waste of time. So what possible good would it do for me to speculate what Hosea really meant by his marriage metaphor in Chapter 2 when, more than likely, it wasn’t even written by Hosea himself? I’d rather be analyzing Verdi's "La Forza del Destino" because I know for sure that it exists. I’m 52 years old. "Maybe" doesn’t cut it anymore. Even creativity needs to be concrete.
I could guilt myself into having chosen the wrong priority (lying in a hammock on a beach in the Caribbean) or not prioritizing altogether, but what I really boiled down to was the will. It wasn’t there. So should I feel badly, or suffer? I made this unconventional choice, and choose to live with it. Not a report you want to hear from a second-year seminarian, but there it is.
On to dog walks, garden work, rehearsals, gigging, organ lessons, Field Ed reports, entrance essays, and CPE applications. It's a new day!
Today is one of those days. I had a chance to redeem myself of a rather abysmal grade on an Old Testament exegetical paper. I decided to drop the ball. Not only had I run out of time, but my resources were unavailable to me. These factors alone made it very difficult to follow through, but at the core of this conundrum lay that pesky thing called "will." You just couldn’t drag it out of me.
Unfortunately, there will likely be a very ugly grade on my transcript now. I can’t call my professor merciless. Ultimately, she was extremely fair and gracious in offering me the opportunity for a do-over. But the real point remains: I didn’t get it, and I didn’t want to. Don’t get me wrong. It was arguably the most engaging, fantastic course of the year. But in all honesty, I remain just as bored by the Old Testament as I was sitting in mother’s third grade Sunday School class some 44 years ago.
Maybe something’s wrong with me. When reading historical accounts, I like my fare to be as accurate and close to reality as possible. I love verismo opera, for instance. I do NOT like " maybe" in history OR in life, and find conjecture a wholesale waste of time. So what possible good would it do for me to speculate what Hosea really meant by his marriage metaphor in Chapter 2 when, more than likely, it wasn’t even written by Hosea himself? I’d rather be analyzing Verdi's "La Forza del Destino" because I know for sure that it exists. I’m 52 years old. "Maybe" doesn’t cut it anymore. Even creativity needs to be concrete.
I could guilt myself into having chosen the wrong priority (lying in a hammock on a beach in the Caribbean) or not prioritizing altogether, but what I really boiled down to was the will. It wasn’t there. So should I feel badly, or suffer? I made this unconventional choice, and choose to live with it. Not a report you want to hear from a second-year seminarian, but there it is.
On to dog walks, garden work, rehearsals, gigging, organ lessons, Field Ed reports, entrance essays, and CPE applications. It's a new day!
