For the sake of brevity, I'll probably use several posts to reflect on my first semester. I know it's been a while since I posted anything, but I'm doing very well. My family is out here now, so posting sort of went down the tubes.
My first semester is done, so I'm officially 12.5% done with seminary (based on the graduation requirements) and it feels good. Surprisingly, the least difficult challenge I faced was seminary itself. I had an overwhelming amount of enthusiasm that carried me through the entire semester. There were times I didn't feel like studying, but they were brief, and they minimally impacted my grade. With that said, I care very little about my grades, so I won't talk much about them. I have noticed there are two different ways to go about studying. I could either study what I know I need to know academically, or I could carefully absorb the wealth of information available on a personal level, with the hope of it impacting my life and ministry. I've chosen the latter. When I go through the curriculum, I understand that it was carefully chosen by the professors to not just be studied for a grade, but to be seen as something important for us to understand for future ministry.
The challenge of the semester is behind me, and now I face new challenges. The winterim, for example, is taught by Bruce Ware, and I have about 1000 pages to read by January 9th. I'm looking forward to many other classes, and I'm thankful God has given me such a strong interest in all of classes offered here.
With that said, there are other challenges the Lord has brought my way I'll discuss in future posts that seem to cripple me, and remind me of my own depravity, weakness, and insufficiency on an hourly basis. I'm thankful for those, because God uses them to ensure any success I experience anywhere else will not make me prideful. The other perspective I hang on to for dear life is a desire to please my Lord and King. Other people may or may not be impressed with me for any reason, but at the end of the day, I always ask myself, was God pleased with me today? The Lord is not a hard task-master, and I'm thankful my salvation is blood-bought. The perspective I fight for vehemently is the same as my Lord who said, "I only come to do the will of My Father." I can;t tell you how many times my prayer has been the same: "more Grace, Lord, please... more Grace."
