A View from the Vicarage

Dear Friends,

EXAM FEVER

Exam fever strikes again and many of our children and young people are being pressed into trying to show their knowledge about certain subjects in just a few hours of putting brains into action and pen to paper.

Of course the work hasn’t all been done in the cramming sessions of the last few weeks. 
Tests and modules throughout their courses will have ‘examined’ their abilities already.  So why bother?  If the teachers know the standards of their pupils, and some of those subjects will never be needed again, why put them
through it?

I’m not going to answer that one – there are too many varied responses!  What I do know, though, is that there are some times in our lives when a big test, however daunting, can be of huge benefit when we come out the other side.

DIFFERENT KINDS OF TESTS

When you really do have to prepare to give a talk in public and set out your information clearly; when you do decide to write that letter about an unjust situation and it has to be put down just right; when you get the big opportunity that you don’t want to mess up to claim the job or get the position; or when you just have to rely on your life’s experience to know how to cope with a great emotional struggle, those can be tests that take great endurance, support and stamina.  When those tests come, the effort, the sense of enormity, the anxiety will all be comparable, on their own scale, to what those young people feel in their maths or English exams. 

Afterwards there may be relief, the ecstatic sense of success, the satisfaction of just having got through and done well, or maybe the knowledge that it didn’t go well and there’s another test to come that maybe you’ll have to face differently now.

No one likes hard tests. Yet examinations can show where you’re up to, how you’re managing, what you’re learning.  They can set you off in a new direction.  In some respects they can have a real benefit.

So the Bible tells us that God won’t test us beyond what we can endure.  We may get pushed right to the limit but there will be a way out. 

Let’s encourage students in these next few weeks and pray for them and for others whose tests are just beginning, that good may come  in the end.

With my best wishes, 
your friend and Vicar

Hilary Edgerton