It Goes By Fast…

I’m with Scott—it’s hard to believe that we’re past the halfway point in the semester already. It seems like yesterday that we were going around the classroom introducing ourselves, and I still get confused about which room a couple of my classes are in (2^nd floor, Northwestern Hall—they all look the same!). And with the beautiful Minnesota fall we were having until yesterday, I hardly noticed that summer had ended. Now I’m looking ahead to finals!

One thing that really makes time seem to fly is having a six-week class. By the time you get adjusted, it’s halfway over and you are working on your final project. I finished one a couple of weeks ago, and saw my grade posted yesterday. At least for goal-oriented people like me, it’s satisfying to be halfway through the semester and already have a class completed, and to know that it turned out ok. It’s also nice that I’m not picking up another six-week class, so I can focus on my other three courses for the rest of the semester.

I’ll officially be a Middler after this semester ends. With the amount of time I have been dedicating to ministry, I have not been taking a really full load, meaning five classes at once. Honestly, I don’t think I could cram that many subjects into my head at once and dig deep into any one of them. I’m much happier with 3 or 4 classes each semester!

At the rate I’m going, I will graduate after a total of 3.5 or 4 years at Luther. My denomination doesn’t require me to do an internship, so I could have done the academic work in 3 years, but I’ve chosen to have other learning experiences along the way that I wouldn’t want to trade in. It’s been nice to be able to take things at my own pace, but the achiever in me is often trying to speed things up and plan ahead and move things around…

Perhaps the most valuable thing I can learn from this season of preparing for winter is to be content where I am, and not be focused on always trying to get to the next step. Winter in Minnesota is almost half of the year, so if you wish time away, you will be miserable very quickly. As I settle in for winter and think about my seminary career, I don’t want to see it as something just to get through to get on to the next phase, but as an experience to be enjoyed for however long it lasts. And when I do get to the “next step” (hopefully being a pastor), I’ll probably look back at being a Middler at Luther as the “good old days” when life was simpler. There’s no need to rush. Life goes by fast enough as it is.