Dear CF,

This Saturday, December 8, the Christian Fellowship is having a dinner discussion on “Study and Stewardship.” Not sure if you should come spend time with your friends or spend time in your room studying?  Well, that’s (sort of) what we’ll be talking about!  The last part of this email describes the topic and poses some questions for us to think about.

Please RSVP to Clint at if you plan on coming, along with any food restrictions, so he knows how much to cook.  However, if you decide you want to come and haven’t RSVP’ed, please do come—we have plenty of food and plenty of space.

How does a dinner discussion work?  Well, a few hardworking members of the fellowship make a home-cooked meal, and the rest of us come and enjoy it.  We split up into small groups and discuss the topic.  Attached to this email are some questions and quotes to get the discussion started, but generally each table’s conversation takes on a life of its own.
Who’s invited?  Simply put, anyone who’s interested in the topic.  If you have friends who might be interested in discussing the topic and in eating with us, bring them along whether or not they consider themselves Christian or part of the fellowship.
Great!  Where is it? and when? We’re meeting at Kurt Keilhacker’s house; it’s about a ten minute walk from the Hark.  (Kurt is a friend of the CF, and graciously opens his home to us).  We’ll send out directions later this week. Dinner will be served at 6:30, and you can stay as long as you like thereafter.

Again, please RSVP to Clint at .  We hope to see you Saturday!

~Renee

Study & Stewardship
As law students (or as students of other disciplines), we have many demands on our time: friends, jobs, classes, extracurricular organizations, and (for many of us) family.  We know the Bible talks about stewardship of money, but are there similar concepts that should be applied to our time? Are some of those demands on our time more justified or more godly than others?  That is, can we say that it’s more important to build relationships with our classmates that to study, or to get good grades than to run for president of a student organization? Or should we just say “Balancing Test!” and be done with it?  Does it depend on the person?

As for the specific issue of studying (and later, our jobs), should we always strive to do the best we can because of a sense of stewardship?  What counts as “best”?  Should we use the measure of success of our secular peers, or something else?

By virtue of being at Harvard, we have amazing opportunities and access to power (and, not incidentally, money).  Should we accept these opportunities as gifts from God, or should we lay them down? Is it acceptable to say, “I will build up my power now, so I can lay it down later,” or is this a justification for doing what the secular world urges us to do?

There are many applicable biblical and other texts; here are just a few:
Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a town and spend a year there, doing business and making money.” Yet you do not even know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wishes, we will live and do this or that” - James 4:13-15.

The Parable of the Talents - Matthew 25:15-30

No servant can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money. – Luke 16:13

Be very careful, then, how you live—not as unwise but as wise, making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil. – Ephesians 5:15-16

Yes, everything else is worthless when compared with the infinite value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have discarded everything else, counting it all as garbage, so that I could gain Christ and become one with him. I no longer count on my own righteousness through obeying the law; rather, I become righteous through faith in Christ. – Philippians 3:8-9

If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters—yes, even his own life—he cannot be my disciple. – Luke 14:26

And when you discover what you will be in your life, set out to do it as if God Almighty called you at this particular moment in history to do it. Don’t just set out to do a good job. Set out to do such a good job that the living, the dead or the unborn couldn’t do it any better.
If it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, sweep streets like Beethoven composed music, sweep streets like Leontyne Price sings before the Metropolitan Opera. Sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry. Sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will have to pause and say: Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well.
If you can’t be a pine at the top of the hill, be a shrub in the valley. Be the best little shrub on the side of the hill.  Be a bush if you can’t be a tree. If you can’t be a highway, just be a trail. If you can’t be a sun, be a star. For it isn’t by size that you win or fail. Be the best of whatever you are.
– Martin Luther King, Jr. (available at http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/special/mlk/king/words/blueprint.html)

For more general ideas of the stewardship of time, see Darrell Pursiful, The First Baptist Church of Christ and The Stewardship of Time, available at http://www.centerforbaptiststudies.org/ localchurch/fbcmacontime.doc.  For example, Mr. Pursiful states, “Peter F. Drucker rightly noted that ‘Time is the scarcest resource and unless it is managed nothing else can be managed.’ Christian stewardship of time, however, is more than mere ‘time management.’” Id. at 5.