Hungry I come to you

I think I’ve solved one of my dailiness dilemmas. 

I have had trouble in keeping to daily study, even when I have a study set up that way. I’ll end up batching the lessons together into a hour or two’s work, whether at the end of the week or in the middle, doesn’t matter. I’m writing this before diving into just such a batch, in fact–10 lessons, which is the better part of one week’s and all of the next’s. 

It’s a fractured attention problem.

Part the first: I am prissy enough that I don’t want to sink my teeth into meat that only takes me fifteen minutes to chew. One would have thought — I thought — that needing only small windows would make it easier to weave study into daily routine. But not in this. I’m a pearl diver; to touch the bottom of the neighborhood swimming pool and then get out isn’t worth getting wet over.

Part the second: This week I’d already piled up four lessons before Monday dawned. That would provide sufficient meat, surely? But the week’s time came apart in my hands like dry leaves. I pushed writing into each day, but somehow didn’t also end up with large enough pockets to study in the way I prefer. Knowing that my classmates are full of forbearance (what a great churchy word!), and knowing I’d left Saturday unmarked gave me room to not push in studying.

I’m seeing it more clearly now, I think, because it’s arrived from two directions at once. Fractured attention in the smallness of the lessons; fractured attention in the flow of time during the week. An interesting conundrum.


One of the things I did during the week was meet a friend for coffee. She’s also one of my current classmates, and she probed me for my opinion on this semester’s curriculum. As you see, I would prefer more. <Smiles.> To her I mused aloud, and am repeating to you…perhaps I would be better served by taking a seminary class.

There’s more to consider: if I stepped away from Mondays, how would I stay connected in my current community, one I’ve been woven tightly into over the past four years? How much volume of my days am I willing to fill with biblical study? Also, if my intuition that seminaries are emotionally similar to creative writing MFA programs holds true, is that a climate I’m willing to walk into?

Worth considering for a while!

PS: my new daily prayer strategy will be to use the Common Prayer Pocket Edition, and leave study as its own thing. It’s only my time; it’s easy to experiment!

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