Signed, Sealed and Delivered

I have never seen a professor have finals graded in less than 24 hours. Wow! Greek final grade: 84. Another WOW! I am not worried about the other classes, I know I did well enough to pass. This Greek final though was something I walked away from going; “I don’t know how I did.” When you are translating, you give it a good guess and hope your vocab was accurate. I am glad that Holy Spirit class is behind me. We have not all passed though. I know of at least one of my friends that will have to alter his path through seminary because of this. He has our prayers.


Now I am just trying to get a hold of my new CPE site to see if I need to go over there this afternoon before I leave. This has been a last minute change of plans because about 10 days ago Debbie and I were talking and something that happened caused us to give consideration again to her moving up here. The Holy Spirit took over and wow can things happen quickly when the Spirit is at work. Debbie and Danielle are moving up here about June 3. Sam will stay in Sarasota with Blake’s family. This is such great news. Having been two seven week stretches in between seeing her and the family was too much this semester. Now we are on the path together. I am very excited about this. We have already been assigned one of the four bedroom townhomes that we have as of June 1.

Especially since we will be leaving I am really looking forward to worshipping in my home congregation these last few weeks. I will miss them and will need to find a way to keep in touch.

As of know I know that I am flying home but don’t have a ticket since I am not sure when I can get out of here other than we have a wedding rehearsal on Friday night that I need to be at. I guess I will be home before then.

At this point I am going to stop posting until CPE starts on June 7. The local congregation pastor has already found me a room with someone to stay and I will come home on the weekends when I am not on call. Thanks to all of you for following me. I don’t know how graduation will feel since I have never graduated from college, but the end of this first year has so many great aspects that I feel very blessed just to be at this point. Not having a college degree, I have never proven I could come up here and handle this load of graduate level classes. The first semester wasn’t too bad, but this semester turned the burner up to med hi at least. Leaving the corporate world for this has been validated in so many ways this year. There are many challenges ahead in school and ministry. Around here our Pastoral Care professor has a model of life that goes; go, suffer, be killed, be raised, and point to the Lord. This means go, suffer while you become a new person, that old person is killed figuratively, and a new you is raised. That new you points to the Lord as witness to the new life He brings. I really like this analogy. I feel the old me has come, suffered and been killed here. The new me has been raised today and I am pointing to the life giving goodness of our Lord. God bless you all as I know some of you are going through some tough times right now. I have you in prayer, bring your challenges to the Lord and lay them at His feet so that He can take them on and relieve you of that yoke. Amen.

We Can See the Finish Line!

A quick post before heading to Intro to Preaching class.  I have not been as diligent in posting this semester for some reason.  I think the amount of writing we are doing for our classes is probably the culprit.  This semesters writing vs. last semester is close to double.  The good thing in this trade-off is I have fewer final tests.  I have seven classes this semester and only 3 written finals and a verbal final, which I have already taken and passed. 

The Holy Spirit is working overtime in my life right now.  I will have more on that in upcoming posts.  I am still waiting for things to come together before I know just how it is working in my life.  I'll tell you though, when the Holy Spirit gets active it is amazing how fast things can fall into place.  I contacted five people yesterday about something and had responses back from all of them in less than six hours.  One of them was able to give me three answers before ten o'clock last night.  Stand back and look out when the Spirit is working or should I say make sure you have your seat belt strapped on. 

Everyone here is very focused trying to stay diligent to finishing out the semester.  I am not sure of the timing of this, but this week we have our ping-pong tournament.  Next year the timing will be better I hope.  I have three finals in two days, but good thing is we have the weekend leading into the finals to study.  Two are on Monday and Greek is on Tuesday at 5:00pm.  I can taste the end of Greek, I just have to stay on it to pass the finish line.  I know what a marathoner that has run almost 26 miles and sees the finish line feels like. 

Have a blessed week.  "There is one body, and one Spirit, even as you are called in one hope of your calling; one Lord, one faith, one baptism." Ephesians 4:4-5