As an online college instructor, I would hear from students daily, sometimes hourly, with requests for in-person consultations and immediate feedback. In response, I came up with an idea to meet students’ needs in a way that didn’t completely take over my schedule. I would hold “online office hours” and offer immediate e-mail feedback during a specific time. When the time came, I poured my afternoon coffee and sat at my desk imagining students diligently crafting their final essays. I smiled, imagining their gratitude as their attentive instructor immediately responded to any questions they had. I could almost hear the deluge of alerts: *Ding* New message from a student! *Ding* Response from the instructor! I wondered if I would need to extend these hours to accommodate the demand. I drank coffee and I waited. 30 minutes passed: no messages. I checked my internet connection. An hour passed: no messages. I turned up my computer volume to make sure I would hear the first *Ding*. I finished my coffee. More time passed. I was playing a game on my phone when online office hours ended with a grand total of zero e-mails. You could say that the fig tree of my “online office hours” bore no fruit. Rather than cut the fig tree down, I was determined! I dug around and fertilized it and would come back to it! I sent a course-wide email explaining the benefits of utilizing this opportunity and offered online office hours again before the final exam. Again, no one showed, and there was not a single *Ding*. I decided that the next semester, I would not offer this opportunity. I cut down the fig tree and sought better use for the soil. Many of us have had our own fruitless fig trees — good ideas that we imagined would do great good but, for one reason or another, failed to yield fruit. Someone may have even suggested that our fig tree was wasting the soil. Nevertheless, we were driven by hope to “let it alone for one more year,” to dig and fertilize, and give the tree one last chance. Eventually, though, we had to use the land, the time, and the energy for something else. Jesus’ parable of the barren fig tree in Luke 13 comes after a much more serious discussion of repentance and perishing. ...
Thank you to this week's guest writer Thomas J. Carrico.
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