Classy Characters

I feel like I have a pretty good sense for my class after seven lectures. I thought it might be fun to write about some of the characters in it.

I already wrote about the guy who feels like he has something to add to every discussion. To be fair, he often does say something useful. But after a while it gets kind of old.

Way in the back we have a guy who is a couple of years younger than me. He is working on his pastoral ministry degree and is ready to start preaching. He asks some great, penetrating questions. For example, he had a hard time understanding how apologetics is pre-evangelism. His struggle was that he couldn't see how you can draw a line between the two. He made a good point and it's a question of semantics.

We have another guy that I call the preacher. He actually is a preacher, and, from what I've heard, is likely an excellent one. What's interesting about the preacher is that he always wants to share something out of the Bible for everything we discuss. This is naturally a good thing.

But the overall tone of the class is what confuses me. Our professor is outstanding. He does a good job of keeping the discussions reined in. We spent some time this week discussing the problem of evil. As our professor brings up common atheistic questions the class keeps offering unsolicited answers. The professor keeps smiling and saying, "Yes, we'll get to that".

Maybe I misunderstand the point. My take is that I don't have the answers and don't want to pretend that I do. The sooner I get the answers from him the better, as far as I'm concerned.

I also realize that I sometimes cannot resist the temptation to offer my own little bits here and there. I try to ask what I hope are good questions that aren't just for me. I don't want to be a blowhard either.

There's a woman in the class who is an ENT doctor. When she speaks it's usually worth hearing. I sat next to hear last night and noticed that she would work on the reading questions due Friday whenever the discussion started to go down rabbit trails. I guess that's the advantage of using a laptop.

The important thing is that everyone in that room seems to have a genuine heart for Jesus. I think we're all going to get on each other's nerves from time to time. As always, I've got to work on extending that grace...