Wax On, Wax Off

Still trudging through Hebrews.

My students handed in their first papers yesterday. The first sentence of the first paper I read goes like this:
"...Both the protagonist of the stories long for their mothers through their tail."

I'm hoping he meant "tale."
This is the kind of writing that gets you out of high school and accepted into college? Apparently. Have I got my work cut out for me. They are good kids--they participate. They just can't write. Yet. They will.

This could be one of those days where I get sucked into an introspective whirlpool of reminiscence about my walk as a follower of Christ and my thoroughly inadequate demonstration of what that is. I know I'm not where I could be. I know I have a long way to go. I know--nothing.

I'm walking in the tension between knowing that God is Himself, and knowing that I am myself. The stress--the opposite pulls--of living for Jesus through the body of Colleen. I don't want to say anything here about how I need to violently revolt against my flesh, or how Jesus is all the victory I need, but not because those things aren't TRUE--they are. I don't want to post a dozen paragraphs of them because they are just words. They're too pat, too cut-and-dried, for what this life actually is, in the marrow of it, and words are not enough.

This blog is not enough. Nothing I write will ever, ever be enough to communicate the hardship and the immense worth of signing your life over to Jesus Christ. So what am I doing with my time? I've devoted the past five years to words (seventeen students will undergo my red pen today because they can't use words properly). But outside of the artificial strictures of academia--what is it for?
I find that I constantly question the value of my knowledge, of all the criticisms and alternative reading methods I've stored up. Most of the time--in all honesty--though it's fun for me, it seems essentially useless. A means to an end. I'm here for the experience and for the degree. Pragmatism. But the knowledge I acquire to achieve that end--what good is it?

I can't sit around and theorize or ask answerless questions for the rest of linear existence. As much as I'd like to throw an existential tantrum and refuse to do anything more until all my questions have been satisfactorily answered, those papers aren't going to grade themselves, and I get paid to do it. I used to have a large box in my mind labeled "Things I Know." It used to be crammed quite full, but now the items within are so few I could keep them in my pocket.

I know that my work here is not wasted. I don't understand how, but I understand that God doesn't call us to do things so that we can trash them. And now I need to go put that transitory, inadequate knowledge to use so that Steve never uses "tail" for "tale" again.