ADVENTures Before Christmas, Week 3

Each week of Advent has a number of symbolisms, and the following table will be filled as the weeks progress.

Week	Scene	Attitude	People	Action
1st	Journey on a Donkey	Hope	Isaiah/OT Prophets	Expectation/Prophecy
2nd	Bethlehem	Peace	John the Baptist	Annunciation
3rd	Shepherds	Joy	Magi	Proclamation
4th

In the first week, we looked at suffering/penitence and its relationship to expectation and hope. The second week looked at how the solid promises of God through Christ gave peace even in the midst of trials and suffering. Historically, for reasons given below, the third week of Advent turned a corner into increasing joy and eager anticipation as the Day of Christ drew nearer. For some reason, the third week has an association with the Magi that visited gifts upon the Christ child, likely several weeks or more after Christmas, traditionally on January 6, Epiphany. Thus, today, I want to talk of gifts.

Strategic Impact

From a colleague, I became aware today of a newly compiled list…of the “50 Top Atheists in the World Today,” as compiled by atheists. It is a remarkable list with a couple of surprises:  Richard Dawkins is not number 1 (he’s #7), and Woody Allen is on the list (#35).

What is also remarkable is that nearly half of them (24) are academics; that is, they are current or former faculty members. In fact, 17 of the top 20 are. The first non-academic on the list is #10, Christopher Hitchens. Most of the rest are novelists or other professional writers. The vast majority have advanced degrees, even if they are not faculty.

Fighting is Good for the Soul

In some ways, teaching is like parenting in that we are trying to shape human beings, sometimes against or in spite of their wills, and certainly against their fallen natures. If you’ve been reading TSR for any length of time, you know that it can easily frustrate me, and does many other educators from time to time.

I came across an article today called, “Midnight in the Bedroom of Good and Evil,” which is worth reading for the title alone, that dealt with how parents (and educators, by extension) not only struggle against the resistance of their children, but how that creates a sympathetic eruption of their own fallen natures—selfishness, anger, frustration, irritability, and so on.

The author tells an account I will repeat here about a monk living among the Desert Fathers.

Examination

Today was the first day of final exams for the term at my school, and honestly, I am very thankful I do not have to give any and in fact was able to turn in most of my grades today. Thank you, Lord!!

A lot of students wonder why we give final exams. Ideally, it is a chance to see how much of the material presented over the semester has stuck and how deep the student’s understanding of it has become. Ideally, the student has spent three and a half months struggling with the new material, trying to fit it into their understanding of the world and having that understanding reshaped to accommodate it.

The consideration of new ideas, new exercises in critically examining assumptions/arguments—both our own and those of others, whether we agree with them or not—these compose the real heart of education, the maturing of the mind and heart, ideally helping them work together and deeper with the goal of developing wisdom more than knowledge.

A Student Thank You Note

The time is 1:58 am, and I have just finished a six or seven hour intense time working on final grades and posting them for students. A little bit ago, shortly after sending out an email to let them know everything was posted, I got the following from a chemical engineering student:

Intellectual Property

About once a year or so, I have an academic integrity case in my class where a student, usually with the best of intentions, innocence and/or naïveté, will give/email his/her work to their partner. Usually, it is to ‘help them out,’ to check their work or the like. In most of these cases, I believe them, usually because when I talk with the partner, they admit they used the work inappropriately and apologize to the source partner.

The betrayal on their faces and in their responses is sad. However, collusion is explicitly forbidden in my syllabus, but they often don’t realize that is what they are doing. So we have a chat. I usually take points off, but not as many as from the thief.

Humanity

I think I’ve commented on this verse before, but it is so fundamental that its applications seem never ending. Micah 6:8 says, “He has shown thee, O man, what is good and what the Lord requires of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God.”

What this tells us is the God looks at our character, our heart, not our intelligence, socioeconomic status, or anything else. For us as academics, at the top of our field, where we receive accolades because of our abilities, this can be difficult to accept.

ADVENTures Before Christmas, Week 2

Each week of Advent has a number of symbolisms, and the following table will be filled as the weeks progress.

Week	Scene	Attitude	People	Action
1st	Journey on a Donkey	Hope	Isaiah/OT Prophets	Expectation/Prophecy
2nd	Bethlehem	Peace	John the Baptist	Annunciation
3rd
4th

Last week I mentioned how Advent starts off in a spirit of penitence. Not only is purple symbolic of royalty, it is symbolic of suffering. Yet, the attitude of this second week of Advent is peace. How do these reconcile?

Grudging Grace

If you’re like me (and I fear you are, and hope you aren’t), then there are times you aren’t very gracious about extending grace. Today I was the poster child for GGD, Grudging Grace Syndrome, and I suspect more than a few faculty suffer from it, especially at the end of term. This isn’t an online telethon—raising funds will never find a cure, only raising prayer. Fortunately, there are no busy signals on that hotline.

Proverb

Love is blind, yet can teach the eyes much about sight.

SDG

Document

The human memory is an amazing thing. It is essentially unlimited in capacity, yet, the storing and retrieval system is exceptionally buggy, unless carefully trained and disciplined.

One of the hardest lessons I have to keep learning as an educator, and then need to pass on to my teaching assistants is to document every significant conversation with a student, especially if you are making an exception to the syllabus or other policy. Either you or the student (or both) will misremember (accidentally or deliberately) key details of what is agreed upon. As soon as possible after the conversation, I try to send to the student an email laying out the terms of the discussion and ask them to reply to it confirming their agreement to the terms…if I don’t forget because of the next ten things that intrude upon my attentions before getting back to my computer.

Resignation

I started this blog in late September 2010 in my role as facilitator of the UT Christian Faculty Network as a way of building community and resources for faculty who were unable to come to our weekly gatherings, and realized quickly that being an online asynchronous resource meant that it could reach faculty (and others!) around the world, and that has both borne out and borne fruit, a very exciting development.

After about four and a half years or so of leading the UT group, I have stepped down from that position, effective with the end of this semester. A main reason for doing so is simply to take a break. Another reason is to allow and encourage others to step up and try new ideas. This is something I’ve been planning to do for about a year, so it is neither sudden nor due to a sudden problem in the group.

I will continue to be very active in CFN, and of course, this change will have no impact on the Scholar Redeemer. I just felt it appropriate to communicate to you, the readers, of the change in my role in the group, as evidenced by the updated profile to the right.

I am looking forward to having additional time to focus on other things, including forming and implementing new ideas into my teaching duties, some of which may find their way here.

Please continue to lift our faculty ministry, those at other institutions, and faculty in general up in prayer. We all need it desperately.

SDG

ADVENTures Before Christmas, Week 1

Much of the information came from the web, where it has been reposted many times, so I’m not sure of the original author, but the site used is http://www.crivoice.org/cyadvent.html

Advent means ‘coming,’ so it is the time of preparing for the coming of Christ. While it is most closely associated with Christmas and the celebration of Christ’s birth, for many Christians it is a reminder to anticipate and prepare for His second coming.

Interestingly, the original purpose of Advent was merely a countdown to Christmas, and that’s all. However, just as no modern evangelical pastor can conceive of a sermon that isn’t three points starting with the same letter, people expect everything in a ritual to be full of meaning to bursting, so meanings began to be assigned to various parts of the celebration. As a result of this ad hoc approach to liturgy, there is actually a lot of variation in both symbols and meanings, as you will see.

Adventageous

Today was the first Sunday in Advent, which is the period defined by the four Sundays before Christmas. While the Advent season itself is not prescribed by Scripture, the concept is very much so. Advent is a time for preparing ourselves for the upcoming celebration of Christ’s birth and all it represents.

Throughout Scripture and life there are times of preparation dictated for momentous events. In Scripture, there are only two days in the week that are given names, the Sabbath, and the Day of Preparation, which is the day before the Sabbath where the people were to make all necessary preparations for food and chores that would not be done on the Sabbath.

P-L-A-N-S

“For I know the plans I have for you,” says the LORD, “Plans to give you a hope and a future.”

Jeremiah 29:11

“Many are the plans in a person’s heart, but it is the LORD’s purpose that prevails.”

Proverbs 19:21

“The LORD foils the plans of the nations;
                He thwarts the purposes of the peoples.
But the plans of the LORD stand firm forever,
                the purposes of his heart through all generations.

Psalm 33:10-11

In our family, the joke is that “plan” is a four-letter word. I say “plan” the way Fonzie would say “wrong”—like a car trying to start with a bad battery. The word is stuck, firmly, hooked on the epiglottis, with severe tissue damage when it at lasts rips free.

Caring Too Much

This evening, Friday night of Thanksgiving weekend, I received a text message from one of my Teaching Assistants. “Hi, Dr. Wilson. Can you call me when u get a chance? We are having issues in [class]”

I was in the middle of something, away from my computer, and wanted to check email before calling him, to see if there was more information there, as I like to have all of the information possible before discussing it with those involved.

It wasn’t meant to be. About five minutes later, the phone rang. I jokingly reproved him, “I thought you wanted me to call you when I had the chance?”

A Samaritan Family

There was a restaurateur in San Antonio for many years, named Raul Jimenez. He loved his city, and in 1979, started fixing a free Thanksgiving turkey dinner in the downtown convention center initially for senior citizens who were alone and/or unable to cook for themselves. Since then it has expanded to anyone needy in town, and currently serves over 24,000 each Thanksgiving, requiring over 4000 volunteers. Señor Jimenez died in 1998. The tradition has continued, and is a major community event.

On the local news this evening, a diner was interviewed. She was a heavyset Hispanic woman with several facial piercings who, along with her family, had lost their home, and living in some sort of temporary housing. She told the reporter how important it was to spend Thanksgiving together as a family. Her gaze swept around the convention center as she said with deep conviction, “and all of these people are now family.”

The First Proclamation of a United States Thanksgiving

The story of the first Thanksgiving in what would become the United States has become rather political. Regardless, there are important reasons for keeping the story before us. Therefore, in this spirit, I share with you the full and original text of the first Thanksgiving proclamation after the United States was fully an independent nation, written by our first President, George Washington on October 14, 1789, as published in The Massachusetts Centinel, courtesy of earlyamerica.com:

The Importance of the Practice of Thanksgiving

Continuing this week’s theme of thanksgiving, I am beginning to realize why it is so important. According to this article, thanksgiving has an awful lot of papyrus spent on it in the Bible. God thinks it is important.

Yesterday, I said that thanksgiving was a kind of gateway to being able to know and praise God. This is true, but it is more than that.

We humans are created in God’s image. That’s pretty special. We are the ‘teacher’s pet’ of Creation. That easily can and does lead to us thinking rather more highly of ourselves than we ought, much like many teachers’ pets tend to do. This pride was born in Genesis 3, and like a spoiled brat, has made life miserable for the entire family.

Praise and Thanksgiving

I am nearing the end of the month of publishing a daily praise, and it is Thanksgiving week, which works out nicely. But praise and thanksgiving are not the same thing. To praise God is to acknowledge who He is—His attributes, His character, and so on. Thanksgiving is specifically showing gratitude for His actions, in particular those that have been of benefit to me, directly or indirectly.

It is usually easier to first offer thanksgiving than praise. We can see more easily good things He’s done for us even before we really know Him. He often draws us to Himself through blessings, and we recognize and thank Him for that, and it begins to get our attention to He, Himself. As we move from the gift to the Giver, our eyes are opened to the very nature, glory and grandeur of the King, and we become in awe of Him, not just what He’s done for us. And we then begin to praise.