I went to seminary to be great.

I’m sure there was something well-meaning in it, and I’m sure that there was a genuine call on my life to take that path. But like many seminary students, I was driven more by my flesh and the desires of my flesh than the Spirit.

I certainly wasn’t fantasizing about praying with someone, or being by the bed-side of someone dying. I was fantasizing about crowds. As I’ve written about in , when I was at Talbot School of Theology, my professors were very uninterested in my pursuit of grandiosity, and continually pointed me to Jesus (who, it turns out, was also uninterested in my quest for greatness).

More than anywhere I have ever been, seminary was the place where I was forced to grapple with Jesus - not the Jesus of my creating - but the Jesus who said things like “the first are last and the last are first,” “you must lose your life in order to find it,” and “my power is made perfect in your weakness.”

The danger with these kinds of statements, however, is that they are easy to memorize but difficult to live. They are difficult to live because they are not ideas we can tack onto an already established view of the world. These are truths that erode and undermine our assumptions and desires.

The goal is to look at the world through these claims, and come to see the world this way, and not merely learn the answer to the exam.

This does not happen quickly. Rather, we start with an affirmation. “Lord, it is true that your power is made perfect in my weakness.” Then we have to be watchful and see the truth. We have to see all of the ways we don’t live that way. We have to attend to all of the places in our minds and hearts that don’t affirm these things as true. We have to see how our fantasy lives betray a different vision of the world.

Our hope, although this is fantasy, is that if we just memorize a verse it will become true of our lives. We think that if we can just learn this information, and then get excited about it, that it will