Too Much Information.
It's the perennial problem of conferences and any brand of high intensity training. One speaker after another comes and tries to deliver the absolutely most information they can in the brief moment they've been given. It's not long before your fingers start to cramp from writing (or typing in my case) yet while you're trying to type and listen one of them invariably falls to the wayside. So I type a little, listen as much as possible and make notations on concepts that will hopefully enable me to come back later and solidify the learning, bringing it to a slightly more permanent place in my mind - so that it will be available to access when I need it.
That's pretty much how I handled the four days spent at the ICBC conference on Spiritual Warfare (from the counseling perspective). It has been (in my daughter's word) "brutal". We run 12 hours with appropriate breaks along the way. But there is a cutoff point to what the seat can take and the mind begins to focus more on discomfort than upon the material you're supposed to be learning.
Now I happen to be on a fairly familiar level with most of the Spiritual Warfare stuff we've been covering but I still am getting overwhelmed. I can't help but wonder about some who might be here without having spent hundreds of hours of study on the topic. I find myself filtering what I hear against what I have studied before. I find myself sidestepping (or when possible) asking relevant questions when topics with which I disagree (or need more information on) are brought up.
This has gotten me thinking about discipleship. certainly I think that Spiritual warfare needs to be taught in a simple and yet thorough manner to every believer - it should be a natural part of equipping to train a believer concerning our authority in Christ as well as the new enemy we gain in the Adversary when we leave his kingdom to Join the kingdom of Christ. But that is not precisely the thought that I'm pursuing.
It's the TMI principle that I'm thinking about right now. I Tend to be a very strong exegetically based preacher. That's what I feel is proper and correct. However I feel the need to be a bit more sensitive to the "how much can they absorb" factor.
So how much can you absorb?