Seminary, why are you beating me up?

I had a final exam tonight for a Bible class that covers the Prophets and the Gospels and I've got to say that being in the class in general I've had a bad attitude and had a hard time focusing. In Bible College we had five semesters of gospels and a few on the prophets so I can't say that sitting through another survey course was all that intriguing of a concept for me. It's not that I don't have more to learn, but just that I don't want to learn the same things over and over hence the problem between Bible College grads going to Seminary. There's some overlap and that's not all that fun.

So in any case, I have missed quite a few class sessions, a few for good reasons, a few others for not so good reasons. Plus today as I was trying to study I just couldn't get myself to really focus on the material. I'm having a hard time seeing the point of memorizing a bunch of data that I'm just going to forget by next week. Plus, I don't think the Bible is really about memorizing facts, but it's about transformation. So, the test didn't go real well tonight to say the least. I answered one essay question (worth 1/8 of the grade) completely wrong because I misread the question (dumb). And another question worth about 1/10 of my grade I didn't have any idea as to the answer because I don't have the narrative structure of the book of John memorized (who does?) It was a frustrating experience in two respects. 1. I don't like the way we are tested on the Bible (not sure I have a better idea). But 2. I have really lost my desire to work hard in Seminary this last half of the semester. I have gotten lazy, I have done the smallest amount to get by and it's shown. I've been getting almost exclusively A's in the first 50 hours of the program but this semester I've just lost interest in getting good grades. I'm thankful that I've got a couple weeks before summer term starts to regroup for more classes. I think this last year will be much tougher than the first two. Mostly because there are other things in my life more important than academia (my wife and my church - especially since I'll be preaching a majority of the time at the new Evergreen campus). My passion has shifted to pastoring and preaching and it makes school hard to take at times. Which is unfortunate because I love reading and studying and school in general but it's hard to split my mind and my heart both ways. Somethings got to give and right now, it's school.

I think on tonight's exam I probably scored about a 70-75% which will probably give me a C in the class. Kind of disappointing but I don't deserve anything more than that for the time I put into this class, no doubt about it. But I hope to gain a little focus back for this last year. I don't want to be lazy and I want to put effort into my studies even when I know they aren't the most important thing in the world. Now sounds like a good time to watch some Seinfeld.