Recently, I was pleased to write a recommendation for an outstanding 4th year medical student’s application for a residency program. I’ve been asked to write and review a number of recommendation letters over the years. While the letters I’ve written and read highlight a wide range of positive attributes, two characteristics have stood out to me lately. Supervisors recognize someone who is confident. For example: “she displays decisiveness.†They also value someone who is humble—“receptive to feedback,†and “shows respect and concern for others.†Confidence and humility are what author Andy Crouch refers to as being ‘Strong and Weak’—embracing authority and vulnerability.[1] Personally, I aspire to such traits, but I struggle to cultivate them in my own life. I want to be confident, but I sometimes feel inadequate. I desire humility, but I can be prideful or arrogant. Perhaps you struggle with the same tensions. Most of us can agree with Paul who wrote, “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do†(Romans 7:15 NIV). [Read more…] about Developing Christ-like Character in Grad School
life in the academy
Teaching Tips: Growing in Respect, Learning to Fly
Beth Madison recently shared some of her tips on teaching in Humility, Caring, and Cheerleading. Here she follows up with a few teaching ideas learned from Ephesians.
Ephesians 4:15 (NLT)
Instead, we will speak the truth in love, growing in every way more and more like Christ, who is the head of his body, the church.
This passage encourages me to remember two things about my students when I’m teaching:Â
- They need to fly–Like a mother eagle pushes her eaglets out of the nest to learn to fly, I try to push my students out of their comfort zones of previous knowledge, traditional thoughts, and prior exposure so they can know truth and for it to set them free (as per John 8:32). We talk a lot about what they think they know versus what really is–stories, statistics, experiments, and ultimately Scripture, are great building blocks for laying a new foundation of truth. I strive for my classes to be safe places to practice learning how to rightly think about issues far bigger than their own worlds and to realize the potentially far-reaching implications of their actions.
- They need to learn respect–Respect for God, Scripture, each other, and the material to be studied is key to the students actually being changed in heart and mind through what they are learning. They need to realize that they should be working hard to learn important material that can help them to help others as Christ would have them to do. Their time in my classes is not just about a grade or even about gaining knowledge, but about a far bigger picture of the value of love, respect, truth, and opportunities for service in daily choices, for now and hopefully for years to come.
Journaling to Practice Honesty (Writing As a Spiritual Discipline Series)
Today we welcome Inez Tan, a writer with MFA training and experience with the Augustine Collective, a student-led movement of Christian journals on college campuses. Inez talks about journaling as part of her spiritual life. Read other entries in the Writing As a Spiritual Discipline series here. [Read more…] about Journaling to Practice Honesty (Writing As a Spiritual Discipline Series)
What Writing Does for Me (Writing As a Spiritual Discipline Series)
Tamarie Macon continues our spring series on Writing As a Spiritual Discipline with reflections on the writing process—including some in poetry. Read Tamarie’s other ESN reflections here, on Navigating the Rapids and how to Plan Long and Prosper. To see other posts in the Writing As a Spiritual Discipline series, click here.
Writing . . .
focuses me.
Having to write one word—one letter—at a time forces me to focus. On one idea. In the moment. Writing slows my thoughts to one idea at a time. It’s like photography. For the object to be captured in focus it must be still for at least a moment; otherwise the image is blurry and indistinct at the edges. So it is with ideas: taking time to record a thought encourages a stillness, a pausing to dwell with that thought, allowing it to mature and develop.
allows me to focus on other things.
Recording ideas, reminders, and tasks as they come in unplanned moments and scribing interesting but tangential ideas, concerns, and things to do while working on the main task at hand—clears the mind and makes room for creativity to flourish. This may be particularly helpful upon awakening. Writing out what is in the mind clears the mind so that we can engage in purposeful work in a fuller, freer, more focused way.
provides a record of the past for intentional reflection.
Yes, emotion plays a powerful role in cementing long-lasting memories, but we are an inherently forgetful people. I write down those experiences in which God and His beautiful truths have been especially real to me. Recording my journey with God helps me remember—now having the memory of the actual experience, as well as the memory of writing about it—and helps me when I don’t remember—as long as I remember to go back and read about it!
facilitates emotional maturity.
Through writing, I struggle to articulate inchoate or nebulous feelings within. Oswald Chambers wrote: “If you cannot express yourself on any subject, struggle until you can.†Why? Because otherwise we are robbing our brothers and sisters of the strength and encouragement that our unique expression could bring them. We speak into others’ hearts with the wisdom God imparts to us, wisdom that can be fashioned and better remembered when we take the time to write them. I’ve found myself articulating Biblical truths to those who do not yet believe in God in a form that they can relate to, and even agree with—because I had written about it. God prepared me beforehand through the discipline of writing. Struggling in the discipline of writing helps others, and it helps us, too. Writing brings worries and wrong mindsets that might otherwise stay in the darkness of our minds to the light of the page (Ephesians 5:13-14).
feelings are a newborn babe
that has yet to age
tempted to keep them in the mind’s cradle
but the swaddling cortex traps growth.
feelings, when allowed to mature,
start flowing
(maybe growing, maybe slowing)
but keeping them locked in the brain
doesn’t minimize the pain.
most truths are counter
intuitive.
feelings need to flow freely
simply acknowledge them
feel the feeling
and
let it go
and by letting it flow
freely
the feeling matures
completes its journey—
sometimes dying neatly,
sometimes persevering sweetly
unearths creative solutions to problems.
I love the notion of writing as discovery. For me, such discoveries in academic writing have been as serendipitously complex as uncovering a new pattern in my dissertation results that led to new questions and testable theories. But oh, the possibilities in the realm of journaling! Writing about a problem you face may get icky emotions from inside of you to outside on the page, allowing you to see the situation more clearly (credit to a friend for helping me articulate this idea). Let me be clear: I am not saying that we should wallow in our problems, or that all emotions are icky. But I do believe that when we ruminate about situations in our heads, it is all too easy to continue on that hamster wheel of worry. Putting it on paper can reveal the underlying issue. And adding structure to this kind of writing can be most helpful: setting a 5-minute timer to get started, focusing on answering specific questions, etc. When I journaled recently about an experience, I recognized my anger stemmed from a deeper issue. I get angry when I perceive others not doing what I struggle to do: love. To love in the sense of believing the best about that person (I Corinthians 13:7, AMPC). For me, the fruit of anger has a deeper root, discovered in the discipline of writing.
but whether the feeling dies or grows
check the root
for there lies the source of the fruit
Letter to My Self, Starting Graduate School
Historian Ryan Wilkinson, PhD finished and starting a tenure track job in the fall, writes a letter to himself at the beginning of graduate school. We hope it’s a great encouragement, wherever you are on your academic journey.Â
Dear Me,
Well, congratulations—you’re going to graduate school!
So—this is your future self, writing from a decade ahead to let you know that you’ll have a lot of fun. On the other hand . . . it won’t all be easy. Hmmm? What do I mean?
Well, let me give you some examples. You’re going to spend an entire Spring Break working on a seminar presentation, and then discover that everything you did all week was wrong. Oh, and there’s the time when you’ll lose a month’s research to malware. You’ll get a paper back with three words of feedback: “Very disappointing, Ryan!†A professor will suggest that a misplaced diacritic accent in a foreign-language citation halfway through a paper casts doubt on your fitness for this career path. Your first article will be rejected when you first submit it. You’ll spend years noticing other students outperforming you, getting grants and jobs and praise sooner than you, and just seeming smarter than you. When it’s all over, you’ll spend years on the tenure-track market, wondering if it will all pay off.
Now, hang on; it’s going to be ok.
Many of these disasters will turn out for your benefit. You will have professional triumphs, and they will tend to grow out of earlier problems. You will do good work, and you will be proud of it. You will publish. You will accept a tenure-track job. But make no mistake: this path is not for the faint of heart. Think long and hard about why you’re doing this. There are plenty of things you could do instead, and you’ll need to know why you should keep going. A decade from now, you’ll be smarter, and you’ll be done, but you won’t be any more valuable than you are today—and you won’t be any more valuable than the bus driver who brought you in this morning. Graduate school will not make you significant.
The good news is that you don’t need it to. On the other hand, I’m really glad you chose this path. If you give up prematurely, you’ll be hearing more from me—and I won’t sound as friendly! The path ahead is a gift and a treasure worth all the pain. It’s the right path for you; you can even think of it as a kind of priestly service.
Now, I get that you don’t fully understand that yet. In fact, I know that you’ve been wrestling pretty deeply with doubt, even though you rarely admit it. You have a lot of questions about God and the Christian life. Frankly, you’ll find even more questions here. In coming years, your training will expose you to some disturbing things—things difficult to reconcile with old beliefs. That’s ok. You have questions; go ahead and ask them. God is big enough to handle them. Proceed carefully, and prayerfully, but don’t fear new ideas. Sometimes, you’re just going to have to be ok not having things figured out.
I think this may surprise you, but in the next decade you will find answers—answers that satisfy you deeply, that enrich and revitalize your trust in God. A decade from now, the biblical gospel looks bigger, more beautiful, more complex (sometimes, more terrifying), more powerful, more reliable, and more relevant than you know today.
In the coming years, you’ll have access to one of the world’s great theological libraries. Use it. Anabaptists and Arminians and Calvinists; Catholics and Eastern Orthodox; agnostics, atheists, etc., etc. They’re all in there. I’m going to challenge you now to engage your faith with the same level of rigor and energy that you pour into your academic studies. You won’t regret it.
But intellectual enrichment can be dangerous without balance. The only way to thrive in graduate school is to thrive as a human being. Ask God for wisdom. Stay in fellowship, no matter what. Engage the church off-campus; this will help correct the limits of academic vision, which are very real. Serve others. Cultivate hobbies, without guilt. Maintain spiritual disciplines. Take time to tend your heart in every season. Spend time silent and alone, and listen to yourself. Ask yourself what you really want in life, and take your honest answers seriously. You think that silence, rest, prayer, and reading scripture are duties; you’re going to learn that they are instead the way to cultivate the life you actually want. When you let business get in their way for long, you will always diminish yourself.
Look for God in your discipline, too. It offers insight into how God has ordered the story of his creation. As a historian, you’ll see the beauty of human culture in ways you never expected. You’ll see the scope of evil and suffering more clearly than ever before. Reading over two millennia of history in depth as you prepare for your general exams, you’ll choke on the horrors that men routinely visit on each other. You’ll weep—yes, weep—over the tyranny of death. You’ll learn to fear more deeply. But God’s remedy will loom larger, and give you courage. You’ll read the judgments and promises of the prophets with a new and urgent hunger.
Not all of your insights into suffering will be vicarious. For several more years, you’re still going to struggle routinely with deep anxiety. For several more years, you and your wife will bear the sorrow of childlessness. You will have children—wonderful children—but you’ll also face unusually severe sleep deprivation. You’ll wonder how to comfort your wife after a miscarriage during the busy first week of a teaching semester. And you’ll grapple for years with wounds that other people’s sinful choices carved into your family. In the coming decade, your heart will sometimes break more painfully than you ever believed it would.
But listen: don’t be afraid of the future.
A decade from now, you are happy and often joyful, weathered but okay with it, going places but somewhat content with sitting still. Christ values you and he will not abandon you. Life is going to hurt sometimes, and sometimes your graduate studies will only add to the pain. But you will learn and grow and become more whole through it all.
Put each thing in its proper place. Graduate school is a gift, and it will shape you, but it must not define or own you. Be present with yourself. Serve your family; strive for excellence in your work. Take lots of healthy risks. Be honest and vulnerable, and don’t be afraid to suffer or to fail. As you face the future, there is only one guarantee—but it is more than enough:
Christ will be with you in everything, and it will be well.
Image courtesy of Kaz at Pixabay.com