by John Kight
Being a seminary student is probably the most rigorous job that I have. If you have ever been through seminary yourself, you know the demands. If you have been through seminary with a young family in the midst of working full time, then you know the demands even better. Between course lectures, assigned reading, research, paper writing, and other related assignments, the demands can stack quickly. It’s because of these demands that I find MyWSB.com (Word Search Bible) to be helpful.
Recently I was assigned to participate in an online class discussion. The prompt for that discussion was: “What is the primary response to a holy and righteous God?” It was an open-ended question to encourage discussion among the group. Everyone seemed to draw their answer from a different perspective—love, worship, obedience, etc. My response was “the fear of the Lord” because this seems to provide the means for love, worship, and obedience. But I needed to defend my response and that required some research.
With MyWSB, I had access to my entire WORDsearch library on my lunch break at work. I was able to search my entire library for both “fear of God” and “fear of the Lord” to start my research, and was able to jump right to each reference to start reading in context. MyWSB was even smart enough to pick up different forms of the phrase, such as “feared” and “fearing.” This alone cut my research time in half. All I did was open MyWSB from my web browser, log in to my account, and conduct a quick search.
In the past, I would have to look through each book in my library to discover if the theme I was looking for was present. Sure, I would have an idea of which books would be important to my studies. But what about those books that I didn’t think were significant that ended up being significant? With MyWSB, I have essentially acquired a research assistant to open every book in my library to the relevant page for my study. Now, the time I would have needed to search through my library can be spent reading and taking notes rather than searching through books.
With my current schedule, I typically set aside 2-3 hours a night after the kids go to bed to work on school-related assignments. In the case of this example, I needed to do both research and writing. With the convenience of MyWSB, not only was I able to complete my research in a shorter time-frame, but I was able to do so during my lunch hour at work. As I sat down at my desk that evening I was already prepared to formulate my thoughts and put them into sentences.
This season of my life continues to be busy. Time is valuable. That night I gained a little over an hour back to my evening. This is a small but significant example of the usefulness of MyWSB.com in my role as a seminary student. It’s easy to use, always available, surprisingly powerful, and saves time amid an already packed schedule. The ability to study where you are, when time makes itself available, is an invaluable gift to the bi-vocational seminary student. For me, it has been a true time saver.
John Kight is pursuing an MDiv at Liberty University with an emphasis in biblical studies. He is Director of Adult Education at The Well Church in Brighton, Michigan, and is married with three children. You can connect with him on Facebook and Twitter. John blogs at Sojourner Theology.
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