So Friday and Saturday, for me, are a couple of days away from the office.
What am I doing?
The weather is ideal. Sunny, not too much humidity.
So what am I doing?
Homework.
Down in the basement, banging away at the computer to finish another paper for my doctoral classes.
I cannot complain.
Actually all I can do is thank you (RBC members) for helping to fund my studies.
Your generosity means my studies are a stewardship that I do not want to fumble.
I will keep working at it.
Here are a couple of quotes from the book (Fred Craddock) I worked through today.
Here is a helpful take on the common thought on the whole experience thing.
Out there in the fray having experiences or cooped up in the seclusion of the study – which is to be preferred?
One is the myth of experience as the true and adequate teacher. Experience can be a teacher and provide a perspective not gained otherwise. For example, a soldier in the trenches of the Civil War came to understand war in ways unavailable to non-combatants. However, the experience was also limiting; so limiting, in fact, that the soldier could hardly interpret that war to the nation and to subsequent generations. The task calls for another perspective, that is; another experience. Getting distance from an event and reflecting on it is experience as surely as being plunged into its swirling currents. Study is not an alternative to experience but is itself a form of experience that grants understanding, even expertise, on a range of subjects.
This next one makes me want to be wise. Would you pray for me?
It is regrettable how much preaching, including that of learned and capable ministers, shows little evidence of the seasoning that is provided only by thought and reflection. Apparently the first thing to be sacrificed to an overload of duties and activities is time for thinking. As a result, we have more intelligent sermons than wise ones.