I'm Back!

Hello everyone! If you were wondering where I was, I had computer problems since the last post. I had to have the fan replaced and within days of getting it back the fan was causing problems again, eventually showing fan error when I went to boot the computer. My login to the blog is on the computer, so I have to be on this computer to login to post. I couldn't get on this computer, so, no post.


A little belated but I hope you had a joyous celebration of the birth of the Christ child. As we learned in our service last night for Epiphany all that came to baby Jesus were in awe and gave as they had. I was supply preaching in a small town about 60 miles from here last Sunday and the lady that did the children’s sermon had a great message that the best present we got at Christmas was baby Jesus. It is hard to follow a good children’s sermon like that. I also supply preached the Sunday after Christmas at my field church but we had snowy weather so there were not many at church. I think that was the first time I preached for fewer people in church than were in my preaching class.

I am hopeful that the New Year's celebration found all of you safe and looking forward to a good year. What do we have if we don’t have hope? I was watching a treasure hunt on a reality TV show and made that connection of the people on those treasure hunts never giving up hope. If they do they don’t have anything after that. We don’t give up hope either. In fact, we celebrated Hope being born this Christmas. The Hope we have of salvation and our relationship with God being restored were both wrapped up in the blanket in that manger. Hope was born among us and we celebrate it every Christmas. If we only have ourselves, we have no hope. In Jesus Christ we all have Hope. In that Hope we are able to get through the difficult times. Amen.

I finally was able to assist for a funeral at my field church this week. I am always in class when the funerals are scheduled. Luckily I am taking a January Term class that gets out at noon so I was able to make the 1:00pm start. We have a cemetery as part of our church grounds and the lady was buried in the cemetery. As my field Pastor said, every place does funerals a little different. Now I have one under my belt in South Carolina. We also had a combined three church Epiphany service last night that was very nice. We had a small reception afterwards which allowed everyone to tell a few stories.

The J-Term class I am taking is Grief, Death and Dying. It is a great class. One of my favorite professors here is teaching it. We go over the feelings and how they relate to God’s story and how to weave a grieving person’s story into God’s story. The time flies in this class. We are in there from 8:30am until Noon, but it doesn’t seem like it. I have another class with this professor in the Spring Semester. This will make four classes with this professor in four semesters. It is a good thing for me that I like taking these pastoral care type classes.

I was scheduled for 19 hours in the spring but I am going to back it down to 16 and maybe even 13. It looks like financially we will need to split the last year into two years so I can work. This won’t be the worst thing in the world as there is a glut of seminary graduates without first calls right now. No one can afford to retire or move to new calls because they are upside down in their houses. The older pastors are not retiring, that does not open up spots for smaller and medium level to move up which means there are no openings at the smaller churches for the graduates. They tell us this will work through in a few years, but who can wait a few years for a first call when we have to start paying back our student loans 6-9 months after graduation? It is a short term problem because there is a huge vacuum that will be created once the economy and real estate prices recover enough for people to become mobile again. In fact they are telling us there will be a shortage of pastors worse than in recent years in the coming years. Shortage of pastors means there will end up being some raising of compensation to get the best pastors.  Sounds exciting, but that is not why we are in this. It would be nice if it were balanced and we would know we have a job after graduating from seminary. No promises in this field or in any field these days. I guess only in the Roman Catholic church do you know for sure when you graduate you will be placed in a church.  On the other side of things we had 4 students announce this past week they will not be coming back next semester. Two I knew about, two were a surprise. I don’t like those kinds of announcements.

They are calling for snow again Sunday evening into Monday morning. Snow, great! Timing, horrible! It will effect the morning commute. I don’t have to go anywhere, but Deb has to go to work.

Speaking of Deb, she started her new job this week and loves it. The atmosphere in this doctor’s office is so much better than the other one she worked. We are invited to a party the doctor is throwing for her husband on Saturday night. I look forward to meeting them and some of her co-workers.

We have a weekend seminar on Stewardship we have to go to the first weekend of February. This might be a good growth opportunity. No one likes to talk about money. Then we are looking forward to finding out where we are going for Internship on March 17th. This will be a busy semester, there is a lot going on.

This is all I have to bring you up to speed. God bless you this season of hope!