Hannahisms

I don't know if you're familiar with Dr. John Hannah, professor of Church History at Dallas Seminary, but he's one of my professors this semester. He's a quirky man, self proclaimedly, but also one of those people with the ability to create "sound bites" of wisdom with nearly every sentence.

For the most part, church history isn't one of the subjects that get my motor running. Mostly, I pay attention because (a) my grade depends on it, (b) I understand how important history is to an understanding of the future, and (c) because you never know when Dr. Hannah is going to say something great.

I've begun the habit of taking two sets of notes simultaneously. The first set of notes are notes about church history; diagrams, dates, names, and doodles of stick people who take up the space in the margin. The second set of notes are what I call "Hannahisms" - usually a sentence or two that sum up what would have taken the majority of us 3 weeks of blogs to say. Sometimes they're funny; sometimes they're serious. But they always make you think.

Since I've been pretty swamped between work and school, I thought it might be good to give you a top-ten of my list of Hannahisms for the first two class periods. Let me know if any jump out at you one way or the other - they're fun to think about and discuss.

1. Seek more than excitement. It is a shadow of eternity, but that is all.
2. A friend is a person who never believes the best things you say because he knows you're a liar, but never believes the worst things you say because he thinks better of you than that.
3. There has never been a time in our history when there were so many of us who have had so little influence.
4. If you're a Christian and willingly disobey God, He will judge your sin and break every bone in your body. In that day, thank Him for His grace.
5. A man is simply not equipped to meet the needs of a woman.
6. People preach toleration when they don't have power. Once they get power they stop preaching it.
7. Committees are places where minutes are kept and hours are lost.
8. You can get away with sin, but not forever. You can also blindfold yourself and walk across the interstate safely a time or two...
9. If God has called you to be a janitor, you should not stoop so low as to be a clergyman.

...and my favorite...

10. Don't think too highly of yourself. The best this world will do for you is to build a statue of you so the birds can come defecate on your face.