meditation on mid-terms #1

Mid term week #1

Long wet grey days are great for growing grass and drinking hot tea by the window during studies. A professor long ago quipped during one of New England’s famous cold, grey and wet periods, “this is why there are no scholars from the south.” What he meant was, there were no distractions to go outside and play—life was all about putting a certain glue on a chair and sitting on it until the work was done.

For those students with ADHD, it probably doesn’t matter if the weather’s nice or not. Jumping from topic to topic will still be the norm, even during intense periods like mid-terms and finals. For those who are studying for midterms, this week is the first major culmination of work, and the first major time of introspection. The question is, “Is this worth it and am I on the right track?”

Those of you who read this who are already out of school still have ebbs and flows on the calendar: times in the schedule that are highly pressurized. Life can seem complex. Pulled in various directions and by various commitments, the question remains the same, “Is this worth it and am I on the right track?”

At out fun day away this past weekend, the concluding piece of fun was to create a personal life line. You can make one of these quite simply by drawing a horizontal line across a page and dividing it into halves and halves again. The line is now divided into even quarters. Place a zero on the left hand end, and your current age on the right, Divide your age by two and put that number in the center of the line, and similarly, put the half that number over the first quarter and add that to that halving number, and put that on the third quarter number. Using these numbers as a guide, place significant events along your life line, both those which seem to add positive or negative value to your spiritual or emotional life.

A sample looks like this for a twenty year old:


0 5 10 15 20



Just give it a try or email/call me for help. What we noticed on Saturday was this: what seemed like isolated events and how we felt about them were generally part of a longer pattern. Life didn’t just get great or terrible overnight. For some of us, it took a long time to get to a certain point.

This is helpful and hopeful information. It’s helpful because by analyzing and looking around at our lives, we learn about ourselves. It’s also helpful to do this as a group exercise—we find people who have similar and divergent patterns from our own, and we get a sense of “yeah, life is like that!” The project is hopeful because we always ask the question, “where did you see God in that?” The notion that God is among us at all times, whether perceived as good or bad, is wonderfully uplifting.

Here’s a Psalm for today:

Psalm 51

10 Create in me a clean heart, O God,
and put a new and right spirit within me.
11 Do not cast me away from your presence,
and do not take your holy spirit from me.
12 Restore to me the joy of your salvation,
and sustain in me a willing spirit.
13 Then I will teach transgressors your ways,
and sinners will return to you.
14 Deliver me from bloodshed, O God,
O God of my salvation,
and my tongue will sing aloud of your deliverance.
15 O Lord, open my lips,
and my mouth will declare your praise.
16 For you have no delight in sacrifice;
if I were to give a burnt offering, you would not be pleased.
17 The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit;
a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.
18 Do good to Zion in your good pleasure;
rebuild the walls of Jerusalem,
19 then you will delight in right sacrifices,
in burnt offerings and whole burnt offerings;
then bulls will be offered on your altar.

In Hebrew poetry, a second line is often there to modify the first. For example, in vs. 17, The words “broken spirit” are modified by the next line’s “a broken and contrite heart.” This who phrase is about being pliable and seeking God’s presence. It’s not about being busted or broken into pieces. It really goes back to vs. 12—“sustain in me a willing spirit.” Skip the burnt offerings thing, it’s just not done anymore; the idea is to find ways to seek God’s presence in your life.

Use this as a mantra today: “Make me a willing spirit.” Or “Show me a sign I’m on the right track.” Let me or a friend know how it goes.