First day back in school

Yesterday was my first day back in school after ... how many ... 10 years? I'm teaching a class at Wheaton College called Data Analytics. I hope to impart some enthusiasm for statistics to the people in the class as well as give them access to the tools that will help them develop the skills that enable them to turn enthusiasm into honest answers to useful questions.

I have 15 students and 1 faculty member whom I will share the semester with. They have a variety of hopes for the future. There are a couple from economics, one who is going to be an actuary, quite a number of math majors. It'll be fun having such a diverse group. I'm excited about giving them a way to "think about statistics" that will help them grasp the ideas in an intuitive manner.

I was surprised at how draining I found teaching a two-hour class to be. My Parkinson's affects my voice, so I found as class wore on that I had to work harder to make myself heard and to speak clearly. It was a sober reminder that just because I'm doing what the Father wants me to do doesn't mean that doing it will be easy. I can't let my comfort or convenience be a measure of whether I'm doing the right thing. If anything, the boxing training that has been such a help for my Parkinson's has made it clear that hard work and inconvenience is good for me in many ways.

The College encourages instructors to incorporate some form of spiritual content into their teaching. I am going to begin each class with a meditation on a verse - typically one that I memorized and have lived with for many years. Yesterday we began with Ephesians 2:10: "For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we would walk in them." I reviewed the different stages in my working career and highlighted how God often prepared me for the next step ahead of time in ways whose significance I was oblivious to at the time. The lesson to draw from that is not to try to become less oblivious! It is to do my best to be faithful to what God is doing in my life today and trust in His Sovereignty, that He is doing today exactly what I will need to be prepared for tomorrow. Both on a macro and a micro scale He has prepared beforehand good works for me to do.