On Finishing Classes

Posted on Tuesday, December 5th, 2006 at 2:19 pm

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First, let me apologize for not putting anything up lately, I have had some problems with the site, but they are fixed now.

It is Tuesday here at Knox and I have finished teaching for the semester. All I have now are some papers to grade, some tests to give and the semester is over. I do look forward to the semester being over at this time of the year because of the hard work that teaching can become, but by the middle of January I am itching to get back into the classroom and wishing that classes would start a week earlier than they do.

I will not be “doing nothing” over the holiday. I will be preaching a couple of times, once at Coral Ridge, once at Rio Vista, both in Ft. Lauderdale. I will be reading, not to get ready for class, but reading in my field because I love it. I have set aside a couple of books that are going to be wonderful Christmas reads. The first is by my good friend Scot McKnight from whom I have learned a great deal about the New Testament, Jesus, writing, fountain pens, baseball, and many other things. The book is called The Real Mary and I believe that it would make a wonderful gift. Don’t think of it as just a book for Christmas, it is a book about the girl whom the God of the universe chose to bear his son. A girl whom the evangelical church has not paid enough attention to for fear of appearing Roman Catholic.

The second book that I am looking forward to reading is a new book on the New Testament called Jesus and the Eyewitnesses by Richard Bauckham. It is a slightly technical volume that argues that the writers of the gospels do indeed contain eyewitness testimony to the stories that they tell about Jesus but that the original readers would have recognized them as such. This may prove to be one of the more significant books in Biblical Scholarship this year.

Of course I will probably read a few fun things along the way as well and will always have time to read something strange. Some have asked how I decide what to read and I am not as systematic as I should be but I read what interests me and what I need to. I don’t read what I don’t like no matter what Mrs. House (my fifth grade teacher) said. If I start a book and fifty or a hundred pages into it I don’t seem to be getting the author’s point or I don’t like the way that the story is going, I drop it and move on. There is nothing wrong with “picking up your ball and moving on to the next hole” as my friend would say. Life is too short to read bad books.

Do yourself a favor over this break. Find a good book, find a good place, a nice pen and paper to take a few notes on (not many, too many notes may not be helpful) and just read for the sheer wonder and glory of it.  Do me a favor and let me know what you read.  One good read deserves another!

SamLam