Dear Fellow Seminary Students:
It is morning and my wife and children are still asleep. This is the best time of day for me to write and read, listen to chapel. I just took a hot bath, which seems to help my arthritic back. In many ways I am blessed to live and work here in Taejeon.
But students are not hungry. They are not in close contact with the source of their nourishment.
Christopher just woke up. He is five. I set up a place for him to sleep behind me. He likes to come in and sleep where I work in the early morning.
I have my text, "One Sacred Effort," by my side, sitting on a tall, thin table by my homemade computer desk, a board suspended across the middle level of an erstwhile closet in the classroom where I teach in my home.
I worried for awhile about whether I could learn everything in my text well enough to pass the test. We get only 24 hours to review before taking the test for the second time. I was told on the phone by Mr. Lasseter from Distance Learning that every time you read a date or a name you had better write it down and remember it. I haven't made a list yet, but I have read over the first few chapters several times, underlining and drawing a small circle in the margin beside each significant event.
My brain is no longer young, and I seem to have more trouble remembering things, though I am delighted each time I read again a portion of text that I had forgotten. It is a pleasure to read and learn.
Basic concepts stick in me a lot better than names and dates. For example, I have received the distinct impression that the Presbyterians are perhaps the closest "relative" we have in doctrine, our formal attitude towards holy scripture. And I understand that Catholics stand quite far apart on some points, in their insistence that certain additions and deletions are valid and necessary.
I understand that early in Baptist church history there was much dissension on just how much to join in cooperative mission work. Too, I have gained a much stronger understanding of how important it is that each church be clearly defined, concerning who are its deacons and how church membership is formed.
Well, I will study some more now, write again later. In chapel a week or so ago, Dr. Nelson noted that you can have a flawless logical argument and still be wrong. That gave me great comfort. I don't always have the tools to argue well with some of the smart hotdogs of the popular press. But instinctively I know they are sometimes wrong, despite their rhetoric, as I sense they are far from, heedless of, the central message of the gospel.
Love, Nathaniel
It is morning and my wife and children are still asleep. This is the best time of day for me to write and read, listen to chapel. I just took a hot bath, which seems to help my arthritic back. In many ways I am blessed to live and work here in Taejeon.
But students are not hungry. They are not in close contact with the source of their nourishment.
Christopher just woke up. He is five. I set up a place for him to sleep behind me. He likes to come in and sleep where I work in the early morning.
I have my text, "One Sacred Effort," by my side, sitting on a tall, thin table by my homemade computer desk, a board suspended across the middle level of an erstwhile closet in the classroom where I teach in my home.
I worried for awhile about whether I could learn everything in my text well enough to pass the test. We get only 24 hours to review before taking the test for the second time. I was told on the phone by Mr. Lasseter from Distance Learning that every time you read a date or a name you had better write it down and remember it. I haven't made a list yet, but I have read over the first few chapters several times, underlining and drawing a small circle in the margin beside each significant event.
My brain is no longer young, and I seem to have more trouble remembering things, though I am delighted each time I read again a portion of text that I had forgotten. It is a pleasure to read and learn.
Basic concepts stick in me a lot better than names and dates. For example, I have received the distinct impression that the Presbyterians are perhaps the closest "relative" we have in doctrine, our formal attitude towards holy scripture. And I understand that Catholics stand quite far apart on some points, in their insistence that certain additions and deletions are valid and necessary.
I understand that early in Baptist church history there was much dissension on just how much to join in cooperative mission work. Too, I have gained a much stronger understanding of how important it is that each church be clearly defined, concerning who are its deacons and how church membership is formed.
Well, I will study some more now, write again later. In chapel a week or so ago, Dr. Nelson noted that you can have a flawless logical argument and still be wrong. That gave me great comfort. I don't always have the tools to argue well with some of the smart hotdogs of the popular press. But instinctively I know they are sometimes wrong, despite their rhetoric, as I sense they are far from, heedless of, the central message of the gospel.
Love, Nathaniel
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