Weekly News | 7.10.26
Summer occasionally gives the effect of days bleeding together, obscuring the horizon. In the life of our community, I want to make sure we have sightlines into some big dates ahead this fall:
8/16 - Fall Kick-off! One service, feasting together afterward!
8/23 - Two services resume
9/12 - COTC 10th Anniversary Celebration
9/20 - Annual Parish Meeting
10/16-10/17 - Parish Retreat!
Below we resume our eNews series, hearing reflections from our community on the intersection of faith and vocation. May it be an opportunity to know someone at COTC as well as an avenue through which we might consider and engage the Lord around our particular work.
One of the hardest things about work is the great divide between its deep spiritual importance and its daily drudgery. Before the Fall, Adam’s work was noble; he had a divine charge to “fill the earth and subdue it”. Labor in the Garden must have been righteous and fulfilling. But after sin entered the world, we were cursed to “earn our bread by the sweat of our brow”. If in Eden there was a perfect harmony between work and worship, our experience under sin is a harsh dissonance between effort and results
I’m a history professor, and summer means lots of eye-straining research in dusty old volumes and the painstaking work of writing my own book. Some days, I don’t interact with another (living) person in my office at all. The work can feel discouraging, too, since many academic history books are published, read – or more likely, hastily skimmed – by a select few academic readers, and quickly forgotten.
On my best days, I see flashes of my work in all of its profound meaning, like a beautiful vista glimpsed only partially through gaps in the trees from the highway. Helping a student become excited about ideas can make me feel that I’m shaping young minds. A touching trace of human nature found in a dusty archive fills me with wonder at the eternal souls and destinies of long-dead people. After a productive day of writing, I feel fulfilled by exercising the creativity and curiosity that comes from being made in the image of God.
But not all days are like this. Sometimes the weight of human sin and injustice in the past makes me cynical. Some days, my desire to earn tenure, or gain approval from colleagues, or achieve the professor’s ultimate desire – prestige! – cloud the spiritual dimensions of my work. But my own selfishness and short-sightedness don’t erase the fact that God has placed me here, for a time, to look into the human past and try to understand the fathomless complexity of the people He has made. No matter how seemingly obscure this task, and no matter how meager my own abilities to pursue it, this is the work God has set before me. And his yoke is easy, and his burden is light.
Zander Batson is an assistant professor at UT's School of Civic Leadership, where he teaches European history. He and his wife Carly have been at COTC for two years and are a part of the Windsor Park small group. He is from Greenville, South Carolina, and loves to read classic literature, grill, run, watch Clemson football, and take his one-year old on walks.