Fall Issue 5
Systematic theology is the gift that keeps on giving. - Vivian Lee
Click here to download a PDF of this issue with the Greensheet
Maintaining a GPA
‘Good Perspective, Ay’
By Claire Perini
Wherever you’re at in your Regent education, I would guess that at some point, you may have made one of these comments to yourself:
“What on earth am I doing here?”
“This is all too hard … I am going home for Christmas and never coming back!”
“If I have to tell my story one more time …”
“I just want to be around people who have known me longer than 3 months.”
“I feel like I am learning so much that I am not learning anything.”
“I miss feeling like I’m good or competent at something.”
“This is costing me a lot of money!”
“Nobody really knows me. People don’t ‘get’ me, and I just feel lonely.”
“Why couldn’t the Bible have just been written in English (or whatever your first language is) the first time?”
If any of these statements resonate with you, I want to assure you that it is totally normal. You are totally normal, and are joining those who have gone before you and most who sit beside you. With this in mind, I want to offer you some tips on how to maintain a GPA – ‘Good Perspective, Ay’:
1. God is still God, Jesus is still redeeming everything and the Holy Spirit is still present… regardless of how well you do at Regent.
2. Remember Whose you are ... The sum total of who you are, your worth and your intelligence are not found in your ability to understand what on earth Foster was talking about in his thesis, or the difference between JEPD sources or how many Hebrew declensions you can memorize.
3. Remember why you sensed God brought you here in the first place… especially when you’re questioning whether or not coming to grad school was a good idea!
4. You are not as dumb as you feel. Others are not as smart as you think… Nothing more to say on that.
5. Be patient and gracious with yourself and with others… For some of us, it is possible that in the last six months you have: changed jobs, changed churches, changed friends, had to develop new ways of connecting with old friends, moved house, moved city or moved country. These are big changes so show yourself and others patience and grace.
6. Stay human…
Take a Sabbath.
Rest. There is nothing wrong with what I like to call an ‘LLD’ (a little lie down).
Eat properly, exercise.
Stress breeds stress. Try to speak normally to one another so that our stress doesn’t infect each other.
Go and do something with someone who is not at Regent.
7. Get the broad brushstrokes… You can’t know everything straight away. Actually, you can’t know everything about everything anyway! Carry two baskets – things to think about now, things to think about later. You have the rest of your life to figure out the details. The Holy Spirit will remind you of what you need to be reminded of at the right time.
8. There is the ideal and the real… Ditch perfectionism, do your best. Don’t try and move a pile of rocks all in one go – just move one rock at a time. Ask yourself, what can I do in the next hour? Know when enough is enough.
9. This too will pass… The angst of deadlines and papers and exams is not forever. Somehow you will get through it and will all get done somehow. It always does. God is more gracious than we think in helping us get through crazy times.
10. It is not what you know but Who you know… Keep asking God what he wants to teach you about Himself and yourself. It may be different from what you are expecting.
Regent is great…but the God who Regent serves is greater. Maintain a GPA.
To Autumn
By John Keats
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.
Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft,
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.
The Extra Disciple
By Steven Gomez
On that day, when evening had come, he said to them, “Let us go across to the other side.” And leaving the crowd, they took him with them in the boat, just as he was. And other boats were with him. And a great windstorm arose, and the waves were breaking into the boat, so that the boat was already filling. But he was in the stern, asleep on the cushion. And they woke him and said to him, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” And he awoke and rebuked the wind and said to the sea, “Peace! Be still!” And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm. He said to them, “Why are you so afraid? Have you still no faith?” And they were filled with great fear and said to one another, “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?” (Mark 4:35-41, ESV)
As the year 2020 plows on, tossing aside our expectations and blowing apart our hopes, it takes no great imaginative leap to summon the metaphor of a storm. And for those of us familiar with evangelical preaching, it takes even less imagination to write a three-point sermon inspiring us to remember that Jesus can calm a storm if you’re able to wake Him up. That last sentence sounds quite cynical, I know; among this year’s side-effects is bringing my latent cynicism a little closer to the surface.
I often find that art, of any kind, has a power to calm my cynicism that preaching lacks. Great art can be a sermon in itself.
Take, for example, this painting by Rembrandt van Rijn, Christ in the Storm on the Lake of Galilee, capturing the moment when the anxious, frightened disciples have just managed to wake Jesus up—does He not care that they are perishing? The still image is dramatically in motion as their fishing boat heaves up and threatens to toss them all into the raging sea. Rembrandt chooses to focus on this moment of immense and utterly relatable terror rather than the moment of reassuring calm that is to come. Almost parable-like, Jesus is deliberately ‘hidden’ in the darkest corner of the painting, waiting to be trusted.
And yet, before the storm abates, before the disciples have been suitably chastened, before Jesus even has a chance to rub the sleep from His eyes—power is already at work. The same wind that buffets the sea is also beginning to drive away the clouds, and the explosion of light strangely seems to be the force that is hitting the bow and driving it up towards the sky. And of course we notice the mast, visually shooting upwards from the heart of that explosion, taking on the form of a cross and becoming a kind of boundary line between the darkness and the light.
Have you counted the disciples yet? When you do, you notice that there are thirteen of them, not twelve. There’s an extra disciple in this boat. Rembrandt’s way, I suppose, of asking the beholder to place themselves among their number, somewhere in this storm. Since these figures are all fairly generic, it opens the field to ask: which one of them do you think you are?
We would naturally like to be the very pious person praying at Jesus’ feet, hands clasped in supplication, saying “Not my will but yours be done.” And maybe some of us are lucky enough to truly feel that posture (bless you, and remember the rest of us in your prayers). It is in fact the smallest and hardest figure to see in this painting.
Perhaps some of us recognize our toil and labour to take care of things ourselves, desperately managing the sails or the tiller. Or maybe the fellow clinging to the mast for dear life, cloak blowing back in the wind. We could be the man angrily grabbing Jesus’ shoulder, demanding our rescue from this misery.
I’m not quite sure who I would be in the midst of our shared (yet privately felt) storm. It changes from day to day, I suspect. Most of the time I’m like the man hanging over the side, staring down into the dark water, wondering how long I really have left. Not angry with Jesus exactly; I know He’s there right behind me, but still I have my back to Him. Despite every piece of evidence I’ve been given that He provides and cares and has power, I make myself sick with worry and doubt. There are those days when I think that my own hands will save me, if only I could haul on the right rope in time; if I could get things perfectly right then I could see myself through. And then there are the moments—so few and far between—when I find myself overwhelmed by the waves, yes, but also by the light, one hand grasping the shroud and my face lifted up in awe and wonder.
When Jesus gets into the boat with the disciples, Mark writes that He went in “just as He was.” I don’t know why this small detail should stick out to me, but it does. He isn’t returning home for the evening, yet He takes nothing with Him and makes no preparation for a journey. He just goes and the disciples just take Him. The story has all the air of blundering into a situation for which you might be ill-prepared. Jesus has more confidence than probably any of us are feeling these days. He walks straight ahead into the wind, unafraid. Yet still He turns to look at us over His shoulder and asks us for faith.
Wherever you see yourself in this painting, I hope it reminds you that even in our moments of greatest fear, the storm is not the only power at work. That even though He seems asleep in the dark, Jesus is still in our boat. That somehow you see the light bursting in, that it hits you with even greater force than the waves, or your own cynical doubt.