Weekly Email: June 15, 2026

Weekly Email

Jun 15

We are now in Week 3 of the Summer term. This week I want to tell you about a basketball game I stayed up far too late to watch and what it has to do with your seminary journey. I also want to point you to a library resource that will give you a head start on your next paper.

In this email:

Student Tip: Keep Chipping Away
Program News: Research Guides at the Library

Student Tip: Keep Chipping Away

This past Wednesday night I was sitting in my hotel room in Orlando, Florida after a fruitful week at the SBC Annual Meeting, a week filled with meeting many of you and talking with old and new friends. I was tired and wanted to go to bed but had some things to wrap up and I wanted to watch the game. Wow, am I glad I did.

It was Game 4 of the NBA Finals, the young San Antonio Spurs, built around their superstar Victor Wembanyama, going up against a more veteran New York Knicks. And for a half, the Spurs looked unstoppable. They were hitting three after three, playing suffocating defense, and carrying themselves like a team that knew it had already won. In the third quarter, they had their largest lead of 29 points.

Then the Knicks did what they have done all season. They refused to quit and slowly, possession by possession, whittled that lead away until what looked finished at halftime was suddenly a game again. I was texting with my brother through the fourth quarter and we both had the same sense, that the Knicks were going to pull this off and that Jalen Brunson, who finished with 36, was not going to be stopped.

The ending was one of the most amazing plays in NBA history. Down one with less than five seconds left, Anunoby inbounded the ball to Brunson, who launched a three from 31 feet that bounced off the front of the rim. And then out of nowhere here comes OG Anunoby, the same guy who inbounded the ball, crashing in to tip it home with his right hand. Knicks by one with 1.2 seconds left and Madison Square Garden absolutely erupted.

I say all this because ministry and your time in seminary can feel very similar. There will be stretches where you feel like the Knicks at halftime, where you're behind in your classes and behind at work and nothing you try seems to be working. Just like a basketball game, time keeps moving whether you want it to or not and you have to decide what you're going to do with it. Do you put your head down, say this is too hard, I can't do it, and give up? Or do you keep pressing on, chipping away little by little?

Now a basketball game does have an end. The buzzer sounds, somebody wins, somebody loses, and everybody goes home. Your degree has an end too. At some point you'll walk across a stage, a diploma will be handed to you, and you'll be done. But that's just a stop along a much longer road. Ministry is for a lifetime. The ups and downs will keep coming and what you do with them matters.

So I want to encourage you this week. If you're like the Knicks, down and out, behind on everything, feeling like nothing is working and wondering if it's worth it, keep pressing on. What you choose to do each day matters and the little things make a real difference.

And maybe you're on the other side of it, flying high, settled into your classes, your routine actually working for once. Pay attention to the small things. The Spurs didn't collapse because of one big play. It was little mistakes all through the second half that added up, settled-for threes that stopped falling, possessions that came up empty. Before they knew it the game was within reach. You can point to the blunders at the end, the missed free throws, the rushed layup. But they never should have been in that position.

James Clear writes in Atomic Habits that habits are the compound interest of self-improvement, the small efforts that seem to make no difference on any given day until one day the results are impossible to miss. The math runs in both directions. Small wins compound and so do small slips. A 29-point lead can disappear. So can a strong start to a term or a class.

Whichever team you feel like this week, the encouragement is the same. Paul reminds us in Galatians to not get tired of doing good (Gal. 6:9). Most of seminary is sowing, long stretches of reading and writing and showing up when nobody is watching. The reaping often comes years down the road, in ways you can't see yet.

The game isn't decided at halftime. Keep chipping away.

Program News: Research Guides at the Library

If you have a paper on the horizon this term (or in the future), the library's Research Guides are worth bookmarking. The library's research assistants have built guides for many of your core classes, Old Testament I and II, New Testament I and II, Systematic Theology I, II, and III, Church History, Missiology, and more. Each one gathers the foundational sources for that subject in one place, so you're not starting a paper from a blank search bar.

Take the Systematic Theology I guide as an example. The front page lists commonly required textbooks, though as an online student you can mostly skip past that part, since your Course Snapshots and Logos library already cover what your professor has assigned. The value is in the tabs across the top. There you'll find guidance on writing a position paper and how to structure it, an explanation of the difference between primary and secondary sources, and lists of reference works organized by topic, like the nature of God and the works of God, with every title linked in the library's catalog.

Many of the newer titles are available as ebooks, things like John Feinberg's No One Like Him and Dr. Wellum's God the Son Incarnate. Some books you already have in Logos through the Logos Max subscription you get as a student, such as the New Dictionary of Biblical Theology. And if something isn't an ebook and isn't in Logos, you can request a scan of the chapter or article you need.

Next time you're starting a paper and don't know where to begin, begin there. It's one of the ways we try to help you do your research from a distance.

P.S. The easiest way to view exactly what eBooks the library has is to go directly here: https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/sbts-ebooks/