Life Is Not An Essay Test!!!

Having spent 27 years of my life going to school as a student and another 25 year teaching students at the graduate level, I have taken and given a lot of tests.  Most of the tests that I took were essay or short answer essay.  Most of the tests that I gave were short answer essay.  Having grown up with essay tests, when I finally had to take multiple choice, true/false tests, I found them relatively easy.  As a teacher, they are also easy to grade, an electric scanner can grade them.  Students like multiple choice, true/false tests because they can guess; and argue that the question was poorly written.  Hard to do with essays tests.  I could always tell when a student did not know the answer to an essay question by the length of the answer.  The students who knew the answer could answer it in a few words or sentences.  The ones who did not know the answer, tried to impress me with the number of words.  Trust me, it did not work!

The same can be said for life.  Life is not an essay test.  God is not impressed with your words or your perceived knowledge.  It is multiple choice with the operative question being: Do you accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior?  He is not impressed with our good works.  He does not grade on a comparative scale or curve.  The fact that a person thinks that they are better than most; or everybody else does it, does not matter.  When I hear the Bob Bell’s of this world talk, it reminds me of some of my students trying to answer a multiple choice question with an essay.  A whole lot of words’ but saying nothing!  Like trying to nail jello to the wall!

As a follow up to yesterday’s blog, there is another related question.  I have to credit my Ft Myers friends, Bill and Linda, for this question: 

When faced with a problem, do you:

A.  Pray

B.  Worry

C.   Pray and then worry

D.  Worry and then pray

E.   All of the above

F.  None of the above (if this is your answer, you better check your pulse to see if you are really alive or check the obituary section of the newspaper)

“If you pray, don’t worry; if you worry, don’t pray!