A Mind-bending Goal: Learn to Read Greek

Wow. So it's been about a year since I have blogged. Or three weeks. Depends how you look at it. Either way, it has been a while. There are many culprits to my lack of blogging, namely...

• Moving
• The start of school
• The start of small groups
• Marriage (it takes up time and I love it!)
• Sleep
• My friends

However, one culprit has slowly taken over my life in the midst of the chaos of life. This culprit will be stealing time from me for the next year (at least), and will surely haunt me for the rest of my life. This sinister thief teases me with the idea that someday I might understand it, but also with the fact that the "someday" could be centuries from now. The lousy criminal who has been stealing away my life is...

GREEK

It's as simple as that. I attend a Christian college, so in order to get a Bachelor of Arts (instead of Science), you have to complete two years of Greek, which really is code for a Nazi death camp. I have suffered through a year of the class, managed to learn a little, and then arrived back at school to find that I had forgotten half of what I knew. Ouch.

Someone told me the other day that they read an article in some journal or magazine listing the most difficult undergraduate courses that you can take. Atop the list? New Testament Greek. I haven't actually been able to confirm this, but it just makes me feel better as I'm woken up in the middle of the night with nightmares of verb conjugations and noun cases.

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm in college, where I pay ridiculous amounts of money to choose the classes I want to take. I have chosen to take Greek, and in some sick, twisted way, I like it. I love being able to learn this not-so-living language. However, the time investment for the class should be a disclaimer given before enrollment; I have never dedicated so much time to a single academic subject in my life.

Oddly enough, whether due to some mental illness I have, or this class' effect on my mind, I want to be able to learn to read Greek. Why? Namely so that I can rub it in the faces of pastors who claim that "the Greek says more, but we won't get into that" (when it really doesn't and they're just too lazy to figure it out). Just kidding. But honestly, to be able to better understand the language in which the New Testament manuscripts are written is like a gold-mine to me. I can't wait to be able to understand how these odd symbols compliment one another to form what we now have in Scripture. It's just amazing to me that it is possible to do such a thing.

So here it is, my (main) reason for failing to blog since I've been back in America, and something that I hope I never give up on: I want to be able to read and understand the Greek New Testament, no matter how insane it may sound. An optimistic life goal, to say the least.