Workin’ It
The first year of law school is quite a humdinger. First year law students, like beauty pageant contestants, seem to have their A-game on all the time. And while you’re walking the halls as one of the “chosen,” you try to shoo away those pestering thoughts that the admissions board got you mixed up with a future Supreme Court justice. Sometime about a month and a half into the semester, you wake up gasping for air in soaked sheets because your unconscious mind finally got over to you that your entire semester grade is based upon a single 3 hour exam. An exam that determines your class rank that determines your resume that determines your interviews that determines your first job that determines your country club that determines … you get the picture. It truly separates the men from the boys and the hair from the scalp.
After about a week of these kinds of wake-up calls, you hear something in the halls about “class outlines.” You find out that outlining a class’s materials (for the whole semester) is the primary means of self-preservation in law school (and your career, and yada yada yada). You finally strike up the nerve to ask an upperclassman about them and you begin the whole panic process over again when his eyes grow as big as saucers and he says, “What!?! You haven’t started outlining!?!” Several drunken nights later (no, not me) you finally sober up and say to yourself, “I’m not stupid. I don’t have to do my own outline. I’ve heard of several outlines out there better than anything I can do. I’ll just grab one of those.” So you do. You get your hands on a few from disks, the copy room, or wherever. To your chagrin, some of them are over 300 pages long, single-spaced with annotations of things you’ve never heard of before in class or anywhere else. Question is - do you do your own thing, or do you filch off of somebody else? It’s just your career, you know.
In today’s Christian “marketplace,” you can walk into just about any Christian bookstore and find things just like those law school outlines: Spirit-filled Bibles, Theological Bibles, 26 translation Bibles, sportsmen Bibles (no kidding), all kinds of devotionals, walk-through-the-bible study guides, and books about “prosperity promises,” “success promises,” and “healing verses.” While all these seem pretty good, that pesky little question still raises its head - do you do your own thing, or do you filch off of somebody else?
In her healing ministry, Lilian Yeomans would make people cobble together their own collections of healing verses instead of buying some off the shelf. In some cases, she made her hearer listen to her read the Bible for hours at a time. (When is the last time you’ve heard something like that?) In doing these things, she forced them to confront the Word for themselves. Consequently, she had many wonderful healing testimonies in her ministry. While study materials are good (in law school I regularly consulted other outlines in order to better my own), there just ain’t no substitute for workin’ it yourself. Just ask that woman in Mark 5.