Soul Renovatus

A good first semester of seminary...

Well, I just saw my grades for my first semester...all As!  I got one A-, so I ended up with a 3.9 GPA.  Feels good for all that hard work to pay off in the end. 

Next semester, I'm taking four classes, which will be a stretch (esp. considering Greek is one of them), but we will see how it goes.  If I do the 4 in the fall 3 in the spring schedule, I will be done hopefully by spring of 2011 with and MDiv.  Right now I'm trying to see if I can a find a refresher Greek course online to see if I can test out of the first two years of Greek.  I took it ages ago, but I forgot a lot of it.

I also went back to my Torah study last night, which was refreshing.  It was great to see the group again and get right back to discussing Torah. I have learned so much from that and from the people in it.

I also wrote down my tentative reading list this summer that I hope to plug through.  It's hard to read these books when you're in school providing you're reading a thousand other books.

Starting seminary...

So, I've finally started seminary.  Life has been pretty nuts enough before this started, now it's just getting more cramped.  Here are the classes I'm taking this semester:

1) Biblical Hermeneutics
2) Organizational Leadership
3) Christian Spiritual (Trans)Formation

#3 is the only class I attend on campus.  I take the other two by extension.  Hermeneutics is definitely a class I need to study for in the early evening or during the day because listening to the lectures late at night do nothing but help me sleep better.

Organizational Leadership is probably the class I'm most excited about. I'm already gaining many insights from reading the first book so far (Reframing Organizations by Bolman and Deal).  It's an online class, so lots of papers and message board posts.

The Formation class is uh...ok I guess.  We'll wait and see.  Thankfully, three of my friends are in it, including my friend Joe. One of the objectives in the syllabus was "practice appropriate spiritual disciplines."  As opposed to the inappropriate ones like reading Brian McClaren and contemplative prayer.  I'll save that for a later post because I want to wait and see what happens.

Besides all of that, I am a bit anxious because it's been a long time since I've been in school.  Obviously there's MUCH more reading (you actually have to READ the books in graduate level courses), and much more papers to write.  I'm enjoying not having to take tests as much.  Most of the undergrad tests were pretty stupid in my opinion.  I didn't learn too much from most of that stuff. I learned a lot more by the papers I had to write.

This definitely requires much more discipline time management wise, but so far I feel okay.  I'm a little bit behind, but you have to plan out which classes you are studying for which nights and stay on schedule.  So far, it's okay.  I think the hardest part is making sure Julia and I have some time alone just to chill and chat.

I still have no idea where seminary is going to lead at this point, but I'm sure it will become more clearer as I trod along this journey.