Decompression

Seminary is amazing, but there are times when there is no choice but to react and not think about some of the things that are being taught in class. Nor are you given time to fully stop and consider self-belief in some of the topics brought up. So here I am with about 2 weeks to consider my last quarter/year of seminary and think about some of my personal beliefs on each of the topics. These are boring and uninteresting to common readers, or at least they bore me.

Yet I am sitting typing this, waiting to go out to dinner with my Arroyo Grande friends for all you can eat pizza, I am turned back to a simple cross that is around my neck and what it means. It is odd to think that it was not a month ago I was in Texas at Cursillo, and I had a whole post on the sudden shock of going back into the real world, and not much changed about my life. With the sudden dunking of papers, finals, midterms, third declension of Greek nouns all looming over my head, I was just able to scrape by to Thanksgiving, and then crawl my way through finals week and into Christmas break. I have only one regret about Cursillo: That I did not go out and stand in the Texas Thunderstorm, despite every instinct to do so.

So now I am at my parents house and have just been listening in on some of the things that my Dad has commented about being in ministry. About problems, about congregations, about governing Presbyterian bodies. He is getting close to 20 years at the same church with is a statement of commitment to his goals, but being in Seminary has shown me many things that have just gone wrong in churches. The question hasn’t come down to ‘why are there problems?’ but has become more along the lines of ‘which problems do you want to deal with?’ Slowly I am beginning to see how each church is a living breathing thing that has a personality (or multiple) that needs help in more way than one.

So here I stand with this understanding of agape love: a love that loves until the object of the love gives in. Looking back at the ‘work force’ that I am going into, I wonder how I could ever give up on someone. I look back and can see that I wasn’t able to help out everyone, but to give up on someone who had invested time in? My little brain cannot compute that equation. Maybe it is that I am tired at the time of writing this, but I know I am able to remember my failures more so than my successes. Yet when it comes to this I can only see the faces of the kids who I ‘know’ were affected by my presence and interaction.

Sometime later …

Back in Pasadena and reading this over again. Not much has changed, and I don’t have any answers to the questions, or worse the answer only produces more questions. I have finished one year of schooling, and have 2 more to go. With school starting on Wednesday (for me, I have no Tuesday class this quarter) I'm looking ahead with the question of: will I have time to ponder all of my questions? Wondering where I might be in two years is a little ambitious, maybe just three months out is far enough.