September 7, 2026
It's the sixth week of the Fall 1 term and this is when, from my experience hearing from students, this is about when things start catching up with you, especially if you've been just getting by so far. This week I want to talk about the constraints your classes put on you and why they might be doing more for you than you think. Chapel is also now available as a podcast and I've got the links below.
In this email:
- Student Tip: The Right Box
- Program News: Chapel Is Now Available as a Podcast
Student Tip: The Right Box
This past week, I've been reading a book called Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better by David Epstein. And I've enjoyed it and it's been helpful in thinking through my own creative process. But one of the main gists of it is that when we put constraints on the creative process, or really anything in general, it pushes us to think in ways we wouldn't have on our own. Epstein's point is that we don't need to think outside the box so much as we need the right box in which to work. So often our brains will follow the path of least resistance.
And so when I think about what this means for you as a student, I think this is why saying "I'm going to read for 30 minutes" or "In these 30 minutes I'm going to finish these 3 chapters" constrains what you are going to do and focuses you in. It forces your brain to work differently. I wrote about Parkinson's Law a couple of years ago, that work expands to fill the time you give it. Same principle, aimed at the clock instead of at your thinking.
The same goes with the writing process. Oftentimes students have this idea that, "I want to be able to write on anything." And usually that anything becomes too big of a box to actually accomplish something. Kierkegaard, who wrote about the "dizziness of freedom," which is the dread that shows up when every choice carries the weight of infinite possibility and the anxiety of picking the wrong one. I feel that every week with these emails. If I sit down to write and I haven't constrained myself to a topic first, I'm toast.
But if you think of the constraints that your classes put on you as the thing that is helping you think in a certain way and unlock certain levels of creativity, I think you can get a lot more out of it.
A lot of you will be like, "I don't want to write on this topic." The education division at Houghton Mifflin gave Dr. Seuss a list of vocabulary words for kids and asked him to write a book for six- and seven-year-olds using no more than 225 words from that list. He wanted to write a story about a queen zebra and neither word was on the list. "There are no adjectives!" he complained to his wife. He said the whole thing was like "trying to make a strudel without any strudels." So he went back to the list and decided the first two rhyming words he found would be his title. That's how we got The Cat in the Hat.
Your classes are doing the same thing and that's one of the strengths of education. Obviously, education is forming you to be a certain type of person but it's also forming you to think in different ways. In many ways, education is a form of constraint. Back in May I wrote that time is finite and that God made us finite creatures meant to work inside limits.
When you elected to go to seminary, that is actually one level of constraint. You could have decided to watch YouTube videos, make a reading list, or subscribing to various services. But you didn't. So I'd encourage you to think to another level of constraints you could add, whether that's setting the timer for 60 minutes of reading with a specific goal or narrowing a question for the paper that's coming up.
If you're anything like me, the instinct when something is hard is to want a bigger box but what you actually need is the right box.
Program News: Chapel Is Now a Podcast
Southern Seminary's chapel messages are now available as a podcast. This has been a common request over the last year and our Communications team put it together. You can find it wherever you listen to podcasts.
The recordings are still on YouTube and you can watch live.
Quick Reference of Upcoming Term Dates:
- Current Week: Fall 1, Week 6 (September 7-14)
- Fall 2 Term Begins: October 5, 2026
- Winter Term Begins: November 30, 2026
