Weekly Email: January 5, 2026
Happy New Year! I hope your first week of the new year is starting off well. In this week’s email:
Student Tip: Reflections for the New Year
Program News: CrossCon (Session 2) and Campus Visits
Embracing Slow Progress: Reflections for the New Year
As we start the new year, take five minutes to look backward before you look forward. Think back to January 2025 and if you have a journal, a note in your phone, a list of goals, or even a random paragraph you wrote to yourself, pull it up and read it.
You will probably feel a mix of emotions. Some goals never got touched. Some plans were unrealistic. Some things you thought were small turned out to matter far more than you realized. You will also find evidence of real growth, the kind you could not see day to day while it was happening.
A year feels slow when you are in it and surprisingly full when you look back on it. Five years can feel like a different lifetime, yet also like yesterday, although COVID still makes that kind of reflection a little wonky because it distorted time and routines for all of us in ways we do not always know how to quantify. Even if you look back three years, you may realize you are a different person, you have made meaningful progress toward your degree, or your church is in a different season than it was then, for better or worse.
Progress is often slow. The best progress is usually slow progress.
Paul Kingsnorth’s phrase “the machine” has continued to be a reflection point for me this past week. His critique is really about pace and pressure and about how the constant demand for more becomes normal without us noticing. When it does, it can start to unmake us. We trade depth for speed, presence for productivity, and formation for output, and we can do it while pursuing good things like seminary and ministry. If you are not careful, you begin measuring your life by what you can produce, and the cost shows up in many hidden ways. You begin to lose your joy, your attention is going in a thousand directions, and your “why” begins to disappear.
As you start the new year, set goals if you’d like, but anchor them in rhythms that protect depth, presence, and joy. Seminary, ministry, and other good things have a way of tempting us to treat life like a production line, especially when things get busy. Just like on a production line, if you have a myopic view of the process you may make a quick fix that has negative effects later that you can’t see. The better way is a more comprehensive, steadier path, which is marked by consistent work, rest, and faithfulness in small places that adds up over time.
I have given in to the New Year temptation more times than I can count. Grand declarations. Major changes. The list of habits I’m going to stop, plus the new daily rituals that promise big transformations. I do not think the new year is the best time for that kind of thinking, because if you are trying to grow in small ways, this work should already be underway in October and February and a random Tuesday in June.
The new year offers a false sense of restart. We are coming off the holidays, routines are disrupted, sleep and schedules are off, and a lot of good habits have been inconsistent for weeks. That is understandable but it also creates a specific kind of impatience, which is the urge to fix everything at once, right now, in a way that won’t really last.
Ecclesiastes says, “The end of a matter is better than its beginning; a patient spirit is better than a proud spirit.” (Ecclesiastes 7:8) That verse is not a productivity slogan. It is a reality check. You do not get the end without the middle, and the middle is where patience is formed.
In seminary, oftentimes the stress is rarely just an assignment but its the assignment(s) hanging over your head for days because it is always in the back of your mind while you are trying to be present with your family, your ministry, and your people. You have a pocket of time earlier in the week, but you push the reading until Sunday night, and then you are cramming while wishing you could turn your brain off.
Pick one small rhythm and commit to it for the first few weeks of the term. Put a block on your calendar on Wednesday, or whatever day is realistic for you, and treat it like an appointment you do not casually cancel. Use it to get ahead instead of catching up. Read thirty pages. Draft one paragraph. Outline the argument. Write the first messy version of the assignment. Small progress is still progress, and small progress done consistently turns into momentum.
I have watched this play out in my own life. I remember when I first started writing these newsletters and I remember being two months in and thinking eight newsletters was not that much or even wondering if it was worth it. Now, after more than seventy-five weeks of writing to you consistently, I look back and see a body of work that did not come from one heroic push, but from showing up week by week. It is the same with your health, too. Losing weight, adding strength, building endurance, all of it is slow, compounding work.
Your degree is similar. In the early semesters you wonder if you will ever finish, and then one day you realize you are closer than you think because the weeks stacked up without you fully noticing.
Now I want to say something carefully about Jesus, because I do not always love the way people use him as a productivity example. My instinct is often to gloss over that kind of move because it can feel like we are forcing Jesus into modern categories he is not trying to serve. Still, there is something true here if we handle it with humility and caution.
Jesus was not frantic and he was not constantly chasing visible outcomes. He was focused on the Father’s will and he was present with people along the way. He took time to pray, he received interruptions, he welcomed children, he stayed at bedsides, and he loved the people in front of him without living like everything was an emergency.
I am not ending this with guilt. I am ending it with permission and with a better aim. Do not let the machine convince you that the only meaningful progress is fast progress and do not let the start of a new year trick you into thinking you have to become a different person overnight.
Be faithful where you are. Make one or two small changes that protect your attention and your presence. Then keep showing up.
If you do that, you will look up in January 2027 and realize you made real progress and you did not lose your soul in the process.
Program News: CrossCon (Session 2)
It was great to see and talk with a few of you during the first CrossCon session. If you are in Louisville for this week’s second session, do not hesitate to reach out. I’d love to meet you.
CrossCon is often a turning point for students who are starting to ask bigger questions about calling, training, and what faithfulness might look like over the long haul. If you brought students from your church, Southern has several touchpoints designed specifically for prospective students, and they are worth your time.
You can find the full schedule here: sbts.edu/cross
Separate from CrossCon, if you ever want to bring a group, or even one person, to visit Boyce College or Southern Seminary, reach out to me or contact our Admissions team. We schedule visits and give tours year-round and it is one of the best ways to get a real feel for campus, even if they plan to do their studies online.
You can also the recordings of the CrossCon sessions on their YouTube page here. I listened to Carl Truman’s lecture, “How the Church is the Answer to Modern Identity” which is worth a listen.
Quick Reference of Upcoming Term Dates:
Current Week: Winter, Week 5 (January 5-January 12)
Spring 1 Term Begins: February 2, 2026
Spring 2 Term Begins: April 6, 2026
