Every semester, fifty students sign up for my online Composition I course. Because it is carried on via the Internet and not in a face-to-face mode, this class often has more than its share of worries and paranoia. In the classroom, my students figure out pretty quickly that I’m a reasonable guy, not looking for excuses to fail them. But when they don’t get to know me personally, they take longer to get a sense of just who I am.
One of the issues that always comes to the fore in this class is due dates. For a significant slice of that class, due dates are deadlines. They wouldn’t dream of turning something in at 12:01 a.m. on Thursday when the due date was midnight on Wednesday. Another group believes that they can stretch that due date to some degree. They’ll figure that as long as they haven’t gone to bed for Wednesday, then it’s still Wednesday—sorta. They’ll send the paper in at 2:03 and assume, rightly it turns out, that I’ll count it on time. Another group wants to stretch things even further, but they’ll email me with some sort of boring story, explaining how their gerbil died and the phone bill was late and they got called into work and the kitchen drain was stopped up so could they please turn the paper in Friday instead of Tuesday. Generally, unless the person has made a habit of this sort of stretching, I’ll grant them that flexibility. After all, it’s not as if the paper gets easier to write if you have a couple of extra days. And besides, I’m not going to run out of things to grade during that time.
But then there are the abusers of the system. These are the people who simply assume that, although I’ve stated due dates clearly and said things that indicate that they’ll get absolutely no credit for anything turned in a nanosecond late, I really didn’t mean it. They’re like Kevin, the guy who recently turned in his “Article Response” assignment. That paper was due on February 1. Kevin’s paper came in last Monday, March 6. That would be nearly five weeks late if you’re keeping score at home.
Kevin’s paper didn’t get graded. Kevin’s paper got deleted, and I sent him an email that explained that it was simply too late to be considered. As a result, he lost 125 out of a 1,000 points and probably guaranteed that he’ll get nothing better than a C for the semester. Kevin hasn’t complained about this, but now and again somebody does. They seem to believe that, despite all the stuff I’ve written in the syllabus, I will never actually pull the trigger and penalize them for their transgressions. They are wrong.
God, we are reminded time and again in scripture, is a God of mercy, slow to anger, but he does anger eventually. When he angers, God is not reluctant at all to “pull the trigger.” Unlike me in teacher mode, God knows exactly the right time to pull the trigger, and he does it with absolute justice. As we celebrate and praise our God of love, we should be careful not to forget his capacity for wrath or tempt it.
Tune My Heart is primarily an aid to the devotional life of its author, Mark Browning, who holds the copyright for this material. It is provided online in hopes that some will find it edifying. All contents, unless otherwise noted, may be redistributed freely provided that you give credit for its origin and do not charge anything.