The Meyer Minute for January 22, 2013

I didn’t sleep well last night, was awake for several hours when I should have been blissfully asleep. I was fretting over the list of things I have to do. No one wants much of time; everyone wants a little and that adds up.

The biggest load on my chest was our students. Some of them are feeling beat up by the demands of classes. Some are worried about student debt. Some are battling the flu. Others are just carrying the heavy load of school, work and family. Is it the moon, the alignment of the stars, cold sunless January, or maybe just life? What most worries me (please don’t write back and say I shouldn’t worry; I understand that but I do) is that they seem to be looking for someone to ease their burdens. If I’ve gained any maturity in 66 years of life, these are in fact the times when God Himself is breaking us, remaking us, and fitting us for His service in this world. “But we know, as children should, that the cross is for our good,” runs a line in some hymn, the title I can’t remember. I don’t hear the seminarians pouring out their problems with the insight that God is at work in their lives through their cross carrying. These are our future pastors. They will have parishioners share problems with them just as they have shared with me. They will find that they can’t fix everyone’s problem, just as the president of the Seminary can’t fix theirs, much as I might like to. They will need to teach and preach how God is most at work when the cross is heaviest on our shoulders. One of my frustrations with Seminary life is that we do talk about God, Jesus, cross, resurrection in classrooms and chapel but it’s academic, understandably so. We don’t personally own these themes until life beats us up. Oswald Chambers: “The Bible has been so many words to us—clouds and darkness—then all of a sudden the words become spirit and life because Jesus re-speaks them to us in a particular condition.”

If you will, please say a prayer for our students.

When I can’t sleep, I get up and pour a glass of milk. As I sat in the darkness, I heard the Spirit. “Instead of crying in your beer, or milk, see this day’s problems and worries as your Father’s gift of spiritual maturation.” “Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me? Hope in God; for I shall again praise Him, my salvation and my God.” (Psalm 42:5)