Year-End Updates
What's Next?
Hi, friends! I’ve clearly been out of the habit of posting regularly for some time. Let me tell the story of my first semester of teaching at Abilene Christian University and preview what’s around the corner in 2025.
The short version is that while I had every intention of continuing the podcast and the Substack apace as the new job started, it turned out to be more than I expected. I’m used to spinning a lot of plates, and I’ve taught other courses, sometimes amounting to a full teaching load while working on other projects. I thought this would be par for the course. It was wicked hard. It seems I still have lessons to learn about managing time and knowing my capacity. That’s a hard truth, but it’s one I’m happy to share.
I taught two courses for ACU and one for Fuller this fall, in addition to continuing in local ministry. The ACU courses—Christianity in Culture and Theology—are upper-level general education Bible courses. I’ve been asked to explain this often enough in recent months to know I should spell it out here. All students at ACU are required to take five Bible courses, which include three required courses that amount to surveys of the Gospels, the rest of the New Testament, and the Old Testament, as well as two additional upper-level courses that can be selected from a large menu of options. Mine this semester are a part of that menu.
I’ll share what I learned from teaching these courses in another post. But I’ll go ahead and register my delight at teaching upper-level students. It is a lot of fun to engage with students who have some basics under their belt and are better acculturated to the academic environment than lowerclassmen. My arrangement this year is to teach one fully online course and one weekend-intensive course each semester. Reflections on the difference between the two also deserve their own post, but I’ll go ahead and note that online learning environments are way better than they used to be, and they still do not compare with in-person experiences.
In any case, the nature of these courses is relevant for my narrative about frustrated intentions because the travel required for the weekend-intensive class meetings threw an unprecedented wrench in my gears. Traveling for work is no joke. God bless any of you who do so! Prepping for these class meetings and carrying them out was uniquely exhausting, and figuring out how to make up for lost time with family and in ministry upon return was frantic and humbling. Every time I thought about writing or recording, I felt too tired or too otherwise obligated to carry through. I admit that was a novel feeling, and not a happy one.
Add to this the demands of teaching Greek Tools for Biblical Interpretation for Fuller and other ongoing projects, and I was stopped dead in my tracks. I’ve continued to sketch ideas for articles and podcast segments—flights are strangely generative in that way. But, to my regret, I’ve left you all hanging.
So, let me say a heartfelt thank you to all those who didn’t drop their subscriptions during the dry spell! Some have, understandably. But those who didn’t—even if you just forgot!—gave me a sense of persistent support that I’m eager to honor. Also, let me not be heard to complain. By no means! These challenges are what I’ve worked for, and I’m truly grateful. I’m just finding it more daunting than I expected to deal with getting what I asked for. I hope you appreciate the transparency.
Finally, there’s a good question hovering in the wings. Will the next semester be different? Given that my daughter is graduating from high school in May, and we’ll be selling our house and moving to Abilene in the Summer, I anticipate a tremendous crunch. At the same time, I’m committed to sorting out the publishing schedule. One of the blessings of this situation is that I’ll be forced to practice something I’ve never been good at: shorter posts! No doubt, once we settle in, I’ll get my long wind again. But for now, at least, you can expect pithier articles. My commitment to longform podcasts hasn’t waivered, however, so we’ll see how that goes. I have a lineup in mind, and I will continue posting episodes in January, come hell or high water.
Merry Advent, happy New Year, season’s blessings, and all the rest. Peace!