It's All Greek to Me

I've recently become aware of one of the most colossal blunders I've made during my time in seminary. Allow me to explain:

As an M.Div. student, I'm required to take either Greek, Hebrew, or a combination of both.

I chose Greek.

I took the first course in the fall of 2006, and did okay - ending up with a C. So far, so good. But then I took a wrong turn; my professor, Mark Strauss, took a sabbatical and his replacement took over the next course with an entirely different teaching method. Soon, I felt myself sinking and decided to simply withdraw from the course rather than risk failing. I thought I'd just pick it up again the next year when Mark was back and go from there - after all, how much difference could one year make?

Unexpectedly, I was faced with a dilemma when the next year rolled around: a new course called "The Ethics of War" was being offered, but it conflicted with the Greek class I had intended to take. Thinking that the ethics class would be much more valuable to my future career, I opted to take it instead, thus putting Greek off for yet another year. Bad move.

Finally, I resumed my Greek studies in January 2009, more than two years since my last Greek class. I quickly found that I had barely retained anything from my previous class, and began cramming to catch up. However, unlike most other classes, one does not "cram" Greek. It has to be built layer upon successive layer, starting with a firm foundation - which I lacked. To make matters worse, my accident occurred in the middle of all this, causing me to miss several weeks of classes and fall even further behind.

Though my professor was kind enough to grant me an extension to complete the course, this means that I now have to hastily work to build and strengthen my foundation of Greek knowledge while simultaneously enrolling in Intermediate Greek this quarter.

And all of this while I still have make-up work from other courses, 12 hours of new courses (Greek included) to complete, a senior Statement of Faith to finish, and my physical therapy sessions to attend three times a week!

So keep me in your prayers, as it's going to be a long, hard road these next 10 weeks.