Sometimes things do not always happen as planned.

At the beginning of last summer I knew I had been overextending myself for too long and needed a break, which I planned to take over that summer. My expectation was that I would be ready and back to 100% by the time the Fall semester started, but this expectation was not realized and I had to drop to part-time [6 hours]. I was a little discouraged, but I knew I had made the right decision and expected that I would be ready and back to 100% in time to begin the Spring semester. Well, I felt much better in the Spring compared to the Fall, not 100%, but vastly improved and continuing to improve. So I decided to take a full load [12 hours] with the expectation that I would be back to 100% within the first few weeks. However, this expectation was also not realized.

I realized a couple of weeks in that I had made a mistake in taking a full load, but by that point I was already financially committed, and since I didn’t have a spare $5,000 laying around my only option was to move forward and do the best I could running on the little I had left.

At about the midway point I had to preach my first sermon for class. As I was preparing before class that day I noticed that my body started to shake, and then I realized that I was chronically stressed [preaching is stressful, but not that stressful]. On the one hand this was good news because it meant that I finally knew what was going on, and that I could starting treating it. But on the other hand you’re not going to de-stress in the middle of graduate level semester, no matter what you do. I did however manage to sneak in a break of about a month which got me rested just enough to finish out the semester.

One thing I have come to appreciate over the course of my health struggles these past few years has been the union of body and soul in humanity; what happens to one affects the other. There were long stretches of time where I could not concentrate on what I was reading or praying, and thus it was hard for me to benefit from doing many spiritual exercises. So I eventually stopped doing them. This of course had negative consequences spiritually and led to a lot of anger and resentment towards God on my part. It can go the other way too where a spiritual disease affects the body, such as acedia or gluttony, but that wasn’t the case here.

One tendency I’ve noticed in myself, which I think holds true for American culture as well, is the tendency to think in extremism and false dichotomies. When this type of thinking is applied to the nature of humanity it leads to either putting so much emphasis on the soul that we live and think as if we don’t have a body, or to putting so much emphasis on the body that we live and think as if we don’t have a soul.

Many Christians I think tend towards the former [too much emphasis on the soul]. While we are right to pay attention to our soul and care and nourish it, we cannot do so to the extent that we forget we have a body as well that needs to be nourished and cared for. Knowing what we know about human biology we cannot automatically assume that everything has a spiritual cause, and that if we just pray more, or increase our devotion to God, or confess some sin that we are unrepentant of, that we will be able to overcome whatever is ailing us. Sometimes the dust of which our bodies are made just breaks down. My body broke down last year.

As my body has finally been able to recover in the month or so since the semester ended my spiritual life has improved as well, but not fully nor automatically. I have been surprised by the amount of work and discipline that has been required of me to recover spiritually. I didn’t use to have to discipline myself to do things like pray, or read Scripture because I looked forward to them and wanted to do them. In some ways I feel like I am back to square one spiritually and now must find some way to recover the love and zeal that I had before this whole ordeal.

I am not out of the woods yet either physically or spiritually, but I am better than I was a month or so ago, and I continue to get better. If everything goes as planned [hopefully] I should be in good shape physically and spiritually to tackle my last semester of seminary, and hopefully gain some hindsight on the events of the past 12 months.