Everything about Paul

Here’s a little ditty I’ve made up that rings through my head very often these days:

Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul,
Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul,
Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul,
Paul.
Everything about Paul.
Everything about Paul.

It’s meant to be said in an almost tired, overwhelmed voice. And the “every” in “everything” should be given special emphasis. And the longer I look at the name Paul, the more it starts looking like a foreign word. Have you ever done that? Like looked at an ordinary word on a cereal box or on some other common product or in a magazine or something and it started looking weirder the longer you looked at it? Must be some interesting psychological research out there about that phenomenon.

Anyway, the reason why I’m so Paul-obsessed lately is because, as I briefly mentioned before, I’m taking a class called “The Historical Paul” at the Urshan Graduate School of Theology in St. Louis this summer. It’s an intensive one-week class offered during what they call a J-Term. There is a whole bunch of prior reading we have to do, and it has a notoriously stressful workload. I keep questioning myself about why I want to do this. Do I like being stressed out? This is a graduate school of Theology. Like, for people who want to get Masters and Doctorates of Divinity, and I’m really not trying to do that for real. What’s the deal? Is it that I want a change of scene so badly that I’m willing to go to these extremes? I want to believe that I’m doing this because I want some spiritual enrichment and because I crave being in an educational environment with people who are about living for God. Yes, I’m satisfied with those reasons. But I wonder if there is an underlying . . . emotional thing going on. A case of “if I could just do_____, then I’ll be fulfilled.” I hope not.

Though I haven’t been on this earth for quite a quarter of a century yet, I’ve been here long enough to know that “if I could just _____, then I’ll be happy/fulfilled/satisfied” never works. Because each and every time I’ve had that feeling, and I finally attained whatever it was I thought was going to fill some void or what have you, it was never enough. I was disillusioned each time because things, people, situations, and places in and of this world are never enough. They only give temporary satisfaction. And I’m not even talking about “bad” things that can hinder us spiritually; I’m talking about normal, ordinary, human things. They’ll never completely solve it. If I’m not cool with being me and with my station in life and with being where God has placed me now, no matter what changes about the surface, about my surroundings and situations, I’m still stuck with me. I took me a while to kind of grasp that concept. One day I want to be able to say what Paul said in his letter to the Philippians: “I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content” (Phil. 4:11).