Long time , no posts

Yes, it has been a while. A long, crazy journey has left me without a call in a church and a wonderful job as a teacher. It has been a rough road for a couple of years, but I am happy right now.
I missed being with young people and working with them.
The local governing body of my denomination pulled some low blows and did some things that were not so great, which left me without a job. Long story, not worth the rehash.
But, God can take a mess(a big mess) and turn it into something beautiful.
I do not know if I will ever serve another church, but I am serving and so, that part is good.

I've learned a lot about friendships, relationships, and what matters most in life. I have also learned some hard lessons about the politics in churches and what happens when you refuse to give in to those powers. I have learned some powerful lessons about how to make it when times are hard and relying on God. 

This has been a time of growth and transformation. I have found new friendships in the strangest of places and have come to treasure those. 
I have found a place to worship apart from my denomination of ordination. I love this place. I love it most because it is so far from the norm of anything I have found in church before. I worship with people who do not look, dress, or talk just like me. The music is different from my norm and the preaching is powerful and current. 

I guess that is about all for now. I may not blog a lot, but will try to post some more. 

Pondering Galatians and Being Perfect

I am in midst of completing a  Bible study on the book of Galatians. We are going to be studying it for our Tuesday Morning Study at church.  I still have mostly  fond memories of my class at seminary. I learned a lot from a dedicated and smart professor, but it was a struggle as I am not much of a Greek scholar. Reading from the Greek was also tough as can be. My Southern drawl made the pronunciation really hard. Some letters just do not go together as well as we might like them too. I was not perfect.

 There was some tension in the class with a couple of students who were having their own problems at the time. Maybe you have met them: They are named Always Right and Never Wrong. Sadly they challenged a lot of what was said and made class a little uncomfortable.

 It was a tough class, but I did learn a lot. Thankfully I kept my text books as well. There are some books from seminary that you just had rather not keep and the others that you never want to get rid of.

I also remember that it was on a particular Tuesday in 2001 that we came out of class to find TVs set up in the hallway and students standing and sitting around them Many were crying and all had their eyes on the screen where we watched video tape of a Boeing 767 hitting the second tower of the WTC. That was a horrible day for all of us and left most numb with pain, grief and tons of questions about the type of world we would be ministering to in 3 or 4 more years.  Galatians took on a different meaning that day as the world became a much less perfect place.

But, for now back to this study of Galatians.  We had some good times in that class.   We had our days of laughing at something funny one of us said in translation or some oddball comment. It was not perfect, but it was fun too.

Galatians itself is a rich letter, as are many of Paul's writings. I still find the fact that we call these books letters (or Epistles). In our modern day understanding a letter is typically not more than two pages in length. But, Paul's letters are longer than that and they are not the type of letters we learned about in grammar class (friendly, business, cover, and recommendation letters).