There is His Greatness...There in my Smallness

For a person who loves rhythm- from a daily schedule to liturgical calendars - I’ve completely lost mine.  My usual every other week blog post has stretched  to a month and I hardly noticed.  Suffice it to say, school is happening. I started in the fall with two classes, but this quarter I am taking three so the already-heavy workload has gone up by 33%. 

 I haven’t written much about seminary here. I think I was waiting to see if I passed.  My last post was about becoming small, and I wrote these words: The baby in the manger seems to be saying that I don’t have to fear becoming small, starting something new, being weak and vulnerable or looking like a failure. 

I’ve passed through all four of those things in my first quarter.

Surrounded by a diverse population from all over the world, I’ve encountered people with  minds smarter and faster than I’ve ever studied with before, most of them younger than I am. I’ve had classmates from Hawaii, Seattle, New Jersey, and Dubai. The multi-ethnic, multi-racial and multi-denominational composition of my classes  means  the conversation is never dull. I’ve encountered ideas and questions for which I don’t necessarily have an answer.  

The technology piece would completely overwhelm me if not for my last teaching job where I was forced to learn some of it; still, I am woefully behind most of my peers on how to utilize it. Navigating my way through building online presentations with a group through something called VoiceThread or learning how to access books and articles through my laptop that are housed in a library 2,000 miles away has pushed me to edge of frustration a time or two.  I’m a digital immigrant. Most of my classmates are digital natives.  I managed to turn in my first big research paper without the bibliography or cover page attached.  When I was a high-school teacher, I’d have docked a student a letter grade for such an omission. My professor (probably slightly older than my son) was  gracious to me.  

 I’ve questioned why in the world I am doing this at this point in my life.  Feelings of fear, anxiety, and being overwhelmed have been nip at my heels daily.   Several times, I’ve gone back to my journals of 2018 to re-read the journey, to remind myself that God called me to ‘let my life change’ and that He has opened every door and guided every step.  

Here is what hasn’t  since starting seminary:  It hasn’t become a cemetery. There’s an old joke that seminary is where your faith goes to die.  I’ve found the opposite happening.  In the fear of failure and anxiety about my abilities,  in the face of questions I can’t answer,  in the midst of  feeling small and overwhelmed and sometimes ‘old’ and sometimes weak, I have encountered the grace of a God who is bigger and more loving and more present than I could have imagined.  He has come to me in conversations with new friends and professors across the miles through the screen of my laptop. He has come to me in the reading the ancient writings of the Desert Fathers and Mothers and the words of the Reformers. He’s shown up in my husband’s patience, my son’s proofreading skills, and my friend’s tolerance while I worked out class selections during a Christmas shopping trip.  He’s met me in the tears when I cried and told him I don’t know what I am doing and I don’t even understand what I just read.  He’s even shown up in textual criticism of the New Testament!  

A few of my assignments have pushed me way out of my comfort zone: I was required to participate in a Clearness  Committee ( a Quaker spiritual practice) in which I had to be the ‘focus person’ -the person who presents a question they are discerning or a problem they face to a group of 4 or 5 people and invites them to ask clarifying questions.  I had to  write my own psalm of lament and then video myself reading it and post it for my classmates to critique. Talk about vulnerability!  Those kinds of days, with a knot in my stomach, I want to quit. But then the next morning comes and I see the grace. His strength was there in my weakness. His presence, there is the voices of my friends. His provision was there in my need.  There is His greatness, there in my smallness.  

So here I am in my second quarter, learning not just more of who God is, but more importantly how big and how good God is.  In becoming small and in helping me to follow Him in this way, I am seeing how vast he is.  

I have a few  friends who have agreed to pray me through this seminary journey. I don’t know exactly what they are asking but I suspect it’s getting translated by the Spirit into something like Ephesian 3:17-18  “…so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; and that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled up to all the fullness of God.”  

I’d like to think I’ve got my rhythm back and will blog on my usual schedule again, but let’s be realistic. Seminary is like a newborn in the house; we are not on a regular schedule yet. That baby in the manger seems to be saying it’s OK. He grew. I will too.