Cramming for Christmas: much like students preparing for final exams, we should be mindful of our own deadline.

We college professors--especially those of us truly blessed to teach first-year students--are modern-day John the Baptists. On the first day of classes each fall, we take our places at our lecterns, computer desks, and laboratories--the banks of the Jordan where we meet our students. The message of our syllabi, lectures, reading assignments, and exams is not unlike John's: This is important stuff, the accumulated wisdom of the ages. You have to know this to make it in your chosen profession. We have a great deal of material to cover and work to do over the next 13 weeks. Prepare! Read! Focus! Study!

And some students (precious few first-year students, alas) heed the word and immerse themselves in the waters of academia. But most are too enraptured with their long-awaited freedom from Mom and Dad to commit themselves to this baptism: It's September--we have three whole months before finals in December. It's time to get in touch with ourselves. It's time to live. It's time to discover who we are. It's time to party.

But suddenly, it's the Monday after Thanksgiving break--Advent in the real world. The end of the semester is but two weeks away. The papers are due, lab reports must be completed, the shadow of final exams brings the partying to a dead stop. Students descend on their professors like the folks who amass around John the Baptist in Luke's gospel: Is this an OK topic for my paper? Do I have to use graphs in my class presentation? What chapters will the final cover? Do we have to know that for the final--and will it be multiple choice, true or false, or essay? Tell us: What must we do to be saved?

We baptists in tweed jackets and lab coats manage to stifle the urge to throttle these poor young fools; instead we patiently answer their questions and counsel them with as much reality as they can bear. We even have a certain amount of sympathy for the bleary-eyed student who drags his body into the examination room after having pulled his third all-nighter in a row, surviving on an afternoon nap and more coffee than the human bladder could possibly hold. You poor fools! Don't you realize that the ax was at the root even as I passed out the syllabus on day one?

The greatest challenge for college instructors is to make their students understand the message of Advent: Time is finite. We with the gray in our hair and lines etched in our faces know what few of our students with smooth skin and hard bodies can imagine: We will not live forever. These wonderful young people in the springtime of their lives will feel the crispness of autumn before they know it.

Just as we are preaching the need for scholastic preparedness at the end of the fall semester, the church marks these same four weeks in December listening to John the Baptist call all who will listen to a similar understanding of time. Time is the precious gift of a loving God, given to us for reasons known only to God, not because of anything we could have done to deserve it.

The theologian Karl Rahner got it absolutely right when he described Christians as an Advent people awaiting the Easter promise. There is so much to do before our encounter with God: the hard work of love, of reconciliation, of justice, of peace. There are many miles to travel on our Advent journeys--first to find God and mark out the path to God's dwelling place. The final exams and Christmas shopping deadlines of December point to a much more pressing deadline that comes to every life.

So take it from one college professor who has seen too many students almost drown in the college Jordan River: Shop early, keep up with the text, get those term papers started, and seek the face of God.

By JAY CORMIER, adjunct professor at St. Anselm College in Manchester. New Hampshire and editor of Connections, a newsletter of preaching and homiletic resources.