“’Love the Lord your god with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’†—Mark 12:30 [Read more…] about Flaky Mind, Undivided Heart (Scholar’s Compass)
Scholar's Compass
Stone Soup, Scarcity, and the Kingdom of God (Scholar’s Compass)
Quote
The story of stone soup (below). [Read more…] about Stone Soup, Scarcity, and the Kingdom of God (Scholar’s Compass)
What Are You Waiting For? (Scholar’s Compass)
Reading
“Wait for the Lord; be strong and take heart and wait for the Lord.†Psalm 27:14
Reflection
As academics, we are frequently waiting. In graduate school, we wait in hallways to learn if we passed our defenses. On the job market, we wait to hear from departments that, like our high school crushes, all too often do not call. As junior faculty members, we wait to learn if we will be promoted to tenure. At all career stages, we wait to learn if we received the grant, if our article will be published, if our paper has been accepted to the conference, if our new course has been approved. Often we are waiting for others to judge our work, and it usually appears as though these others hold our future in their hands.
But we, as Christians, know that our futures are in the hands of God. John 10:29 makes it clear that “no one is able to snatch them [us sheep] out of the Father’s hand.†Yet, despite this knowledge, we are often anxious about what our tomorrows will bring. Like the original disciples, we are worried about what we perceive to be our immediate needs (see Matthew 6), and this worry points to our actual problem. We have too small a view of God; we lack faith. We acknowledge that God is sovereign, yet we fear others more than him. We are often more concerned about how our committee chairs, department chairs, and peer reviewers will judge us than we are about pursuing the righteousness of God.
When we begin to celebrate God’s sovereignty and develop a right view of his control, we can approach waiting in a much different spirit. Our waiting becomes a time of fruitfulness as our reliance on God grows and our faith deepens. The waiting that we do in academia points to the waiting that we do as Christians. James 5:7-8 instructs us to “Be patient…until the coming of the Lord. See how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth, being patient about it…†We can think about James as telling us to wait for the coming of the Lord as the academic waits to hear from the journal editor. Our careers are in the hands of the Lord, just as our eternal futures are. And this is a reason for hope. In Psalm 63:8, the Psalmist declares “I cling to you; your right hand upholds me†and we can declare the same by the character of our waiting.
Questions
- What is it that you are currently waiting to happen in your career? Why does this mean so much to you? What opportunities might this create for you to serve God?
- What does your approach toward waiting reveal about your faith in God?
Prayer
Father, you, and you alone, are sovereign. Let this truth about your character sink deep into our hearts and free us from our illogical worry and anxiety about our future. Increase our faith Lord, so that we can wait patiently to see what you, in your grace and mercy, will do next.
Note: Part of the Scholar’s Compass series.
Seeing Anew This Year
For if, by the trespass of the one man, death reigned through that one man, how much more will those who receive God’s abundant provision of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ. –Romans 5:17
As we ring in the New Year, much ink will be spilled, again, on New Year’s resolutions and promises. Frankly, I gave up on New Year’s resolutions long ago, as I realized that they didn’t make much difference in my life anyway. I was never very serious about them. On the other hand, when I made a resolution in my own time and my own way to do something, I usually did it. [Read more…] about Seeing Anew This Year
Listen: Suffering, Part 5
Mark Eckel concludes his series on suffering. Visit Part 4, Part 3, Part 2, or the series introduction and Part 1.Â
Quotation
“If you listen to the patient, he is telling you the diagnosis. A lot of people look at a specialist like me as a technician. They come to you for a procedure. And there is no doubt that procedures are important, or that the specialized technology we have these days is vital in caring for a patient. But I believe that this technology also has taken us away from the patient’s story. And once you remove yourself from the patient’s story, you no longer are truly a doctor.â€[1]