The Space Between Reheated Cups of Coffee.

Seminary is a wonderful, wonderful thing. Seriously, friends. I love it here. Today I even got to brag on the place to some perspective students. Admissions Office, you should be expecting three rather excited applications soon.

There are, however, times when the days get a little long. There are days when the library seems a little drab and the hours it’s going to take you to finish your Greek translations seem quite endless. I mean, let’s be honest for a moment. Even the nerdiest among us (my hand just involuntarily raised itself in the air) can reach a point when, well, reading isn’t the first thing we’d like to do today. In all fairness to our kind, we live in the space between reheated cups of coffee. And, you know what, it’s great. Just a little wearisome is all.

Tonight, though, we stopped. Just for a moment. Just to regroup. And it changed things. My roommates, Anne and Molly, and I plopped on the floor of Molly’s room, passed around a plate of pumpkin cupcakes (yum yum yum) and shared life and prayer requests and confessed sin. We heard each other and listened intently and then held hands as we prayed. And for all my reading on spiritual formation and the how-to’s of ministry, there’s a point at which you can’t describe it. there’s a unity we have in prayer that there aren’t words for and no matter who tries to write the textbook for it, it’s gunna come up short.

And I’m starting to think the rest of my studies are similar.

Now, I love the academics with the best of them. I’ll talk about theological dispositions and propositions over lunch, dinner, and any break between. But at the end of the day, if Jesus was to walk into my classroom there’s nothing in me that is going to sit back and say, “Okay. Now, let me think about You and analyze You.” Nope. I would be flat on my face.

And there’s no how-to for that.