A View from the Zoo: part 3

Note: read first A View from the Zoo: parts 1 and 2

April was the month of terrible Tuesdays. I had three of them and frankly I have a hard time remembering their exact order as the entire month runs together. A little background first, Aprils like Decembers are stressful for the seminarian. It is cruel, but seminary dictates that you you work hard all semester and then in the final month everything comes due! Being a statistics tutor at SMU, April is doubly a tense month because all of my students are stressed. My best students are stressed because they are fighting for an A and my less motivated students are now motivated and stressed because of fear.

I once had a conversation with my "tutoring" boss about what motivates people. I as the budding theologian declared that love is the greatest motivator. My boss who is a "realist" like myself, shook his head with a smirk and told me that the greatest motivator was fear. Looking back we were both right. Either way even as a seasoned tutor I would find myself struggling to not take on the stress of my students while at the same time continually having to assure myself that their failure was not mine. To compound all this academic stress I had not lined up a job yet and the reality was that the "profession" (sorry Piper!) that I would be entering boasts an average shelf life of five years. If you didn't know the average pastor lasts less than five years at his first church! Yet, stress is nothing new. It's part of life and I think its one of the greatest tools of seminary (possibly grad school). The question is can you learn to find balance and handle the stress in a God honoring way? [Note to self - blog on high cholesterol and stress].

Tuesday, I'll get there . . . a little more background first. My schedule on Tuesdays and Thursdays my last semester were amazing (remember I have a dry sense of humor which should be applied to the use of this word)! I would leave at 6:40am. Arrive in the school parking lot at 7pm. Spend 30 minutes talking with the Lord. Classes from 7:45am - 10:40am. Work from 11-6pm and then if I was lucky we would have a CARES event or some type of meeting which would have me coming home at 9pm. The rest of my time was spent doing homework, writing a thesis, preparing Sunday school lessons, and oh yes, my social life which amounted to an hour with a fellow seminarian and a second hour with my supervisor for my internship at church . . . I was logging 6 days a week . . . and K was just as busy. On Sundays we napped like zombies!

The first Tuesday, I got the call while having my "quiet time." My friend Andy, the father of the little girl Caden who had passed away in September, had had a seizure and had been taken to the hospital. I prayed! While at work that morning, I was informed that a massive tumor had been found on his front lobe. The doctors were concerned, surgery was scheduled for Friday. He is in his early 30s!

The second Tuesday, I got the call while I was at work. My thesis readers had decided to not pass my thesis, a years worth of labor for not. I would not be graduating. I was not sure if I would be able to walk at graduation and for all I knew this would prolong our time in Dallas. I called my parents who had just bought their plane tickets to Dallas to share the news.

The third Tuesday, well I think it was actually a Friday, but it might as well have been a Tuesday. I got the call from K to call my dad, after 10 years of working for Abbott Labs, he was now unemployed.