Me and the roomie are back in school this week! Here’s our back to school picture from yesterday. (The weird thing is, technically I have 3 first days because each time I start a class, it’s a first day…anyway….)
I am actually really excited about this quarter. I think it’s going to be a fairly easy workload, which will be a transition from the past two quarters I’ve had. I am taking Christian Ethics with Dr. Glen Stassen who is a leading Christian Ethicist. I am also taking Spiritual Traditions and Practices with Dr. Bradley as well as Poverty and Development with my favorite professor, Dr. Bryant Myers.
I have been to two classes so far (Ethics and Spiritual Traditions and Practices) and both of them, yes BOTH have intersected with my real life, or life outside of Fuller. In everything we’ve been reading so far in Ethics is about the Sermon on the Mount. The teaching pastor at my church just so happens to be in the middle of a sermon series on The Beatitudes and it’s been my meditation for the past couple weeks. I have been focused on the Sermon on the Mount like nobody’s business in my own personal spiritual life. Then today, in Spiritual Traditions and Practices, the professor talked about the Sermon and specifically Jesus’ call to fasting – which my roommate and I are studying this week in our book study on Richard Foster’s The Celebration of Disciplines at my church. The whole ST&P class is about how our spiritual disciplines and traditions are to interact with our faith in a daily way, which is exactly what Richard Foster talks about.
Not only that, Seth and I had a nice long discussion about fasting last night.In my past, I’ve felt like fasting is empty and meaningless. I feel like I am emptying myself of food, but not filling myself up with the Holy Spirit. I am not taking the time I spent eating to pray. In our discussion, I shared my feelings with Seth and it felt like we were going in circles. He doesn’t like having an agenda when he fasts, but I need one to keep me on track. But ultimately, I felt like our fasting together as a couple never brought us closer to each other. We fasted, but we never talked about it. We never shared how God met us in our fasting, or what was revealed to us. But that is fodder for another post.
Ultimately, I am noticing that God is meeting me in so many ways. He’s meeting me in my church, at the mall, in my home, and now, yet again, in my classes. Our God is a great, big God and I am feeling like He’s holding me in His hands. God’s showing me that he’s around me and with me, and in front of me and behind me. God’s preparing a place for me this quarter, and I am ready for it.