Ph.D.: It Was Good
Psalm 119:71
"It is good for me that I have been afflicted; that I might learn thy statutes"
I think it significant that the good of adversity is a present tense "is" even if the afflicted is "have been." What was bitter is now sweet.
Tomorrow I make my final trip to Temple University as a student. I had to complete revisions to my Dissertation since Commencement which still made me a student, but a graduated one. It was kind of an odd status but the thinking is that if someone passes his/her Oral Examination Dissertation Defense, that is the decisive battle to be won or lost. Since I won, so to speak, what remained was a cleaning-up operation. Tomorrow I put the mop to rest.
The last 8 years of going to school and working for most of the time has been hard, so hard. I feel a sense of relief but also a strange emptiness of what now? Something that has defined my life for so long is now passing away...I am hoping in a week or two my sore butt recovers from sitting so much for the last several months.
Tomorrow down at Temple, I plan to have a hoagie at the same place I did nearly nine years ago when interviewing for the program. I thank God that He has seen me through. Adversity is a good teacher if we listen to its instruction. The lesson that we are weak and in need of help from God is a posture of humility. God afflicts the comfortable and comforts the afflicted, as it has been said.
Matthew Henry rightly wrote: "The proud are full of the world, and its wealth and pleasures; these make them senseless, secure, and stupid."
"It is good for me that I have been afflicted; that I might learn thy statutes"
I think it significant that the good of adversity is a present tense "is" even if the afflicted is "have been." What was bitter is now sweet.
Tomorrow I make my final trip to Temple University as a student. I had to complete revisions to my Dissertation since Commencement which still made me a student, but a graduated one. It was kind of an odd status but the thinking is that if someone passes his/her Oral Examination Dissertation Defense, that is the decisive battle to be won or lost. Since I won, so to speak, what remained was a cleaning-up operation. Tomorrow I put the mop to rest.
The last 8 years of going to school and working for most of the time has been hard, so hard. I feel a sense of relief but also a strange emptiness of what now? Something that has defined my life for so long is now passing away...I am hoping in a week or two my sore butt recovers from sitting so much for the last several months.
Tomorrow down at Temple, I plan to have a hoagie at the same place I did nearly nine years ago when interviewing for the program. I thank God that He has seen me through. Adversity is a good teacher if we listen to its instruction. The lesson that we are weak and in need of help from God is a posture of humility. God afflicts the comfortable and comforts the afflicted, as it has been said.
Matthew Henry rightly wrote: "The proud are full of the world, and its wealth and pleasures; these make them senseless, secure, and stupid."
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