Calm after the storm

I am just about recovering from an intensive week. It was my own fault entirely, of course, but as usual I left all my work to the last minute, revising in double-quick time for Christology (Wednesday) and Greek (Friday) exams as well as trying to write a coherent New Testament exegesis on Romans 8:1-17 in time for 4pm Friday. And there's not any room for manouevre on that deadline (except once when I was *very* blessed/fortunate to survive handing in at 4.05pm... but that's another story). As it happened I actually handed in about 3.35pm - an odd experience!

I can only attribute my managing to actually write stuff for the full time of the exams and to the amount of words required in the exegesis to:

THE GRACE OF GOD

and within that comes

The support of my wife
The prayers of my wife, my family and friends. Special mentions to Nick, Sarah and doubtless many others at my churches (home and placement) who are faithful prayer warriors.

Note that I am writing this before getting my results (tomorrow) so who knows how I'll feel then! :)

Sleep was something I ran very short of, so have caught up a bit this weekend. I am struggling to find things to do (well, not really - there's loads of stuff I haven't done around the house because of studying that I should have been doing over the last few weeks) and it just feels a bit strange. Still, more time to spend with the boy (will be 10 months old this Sunday!!!!) and with Cath, who has had stress from several directions recently.

One of my time-wasting activities is the BBC News website, especially the Magazine. While staying up late to write some exegetical words on Thursday night/Friday morning, I watched the Shuttle not launching (then promptly missed the actual launch two nights later through catching up on my sleep!) and submitted a sarky letter to the Magazine letters page - it got published! Of course, the news item that it links to was being updated through the night and therefore the quote in my letter no longer exists in the article to be laughed at, so either people will think that I'm very odd (likely in any case) or I can take credit for improvements in the prose of some journalist. As if to compensate, they added a 'deliberate mistake' in the punctuation of my letter so that it doesn't make complete sense (transposed a space and a quotation mark) but I can live with that.

It made me wonder how often I've actually got published on the BBC - back in the day when I spent hours (lunch hours of course) on the internet when I was working for a living, I used to submit to the site quite a lot. The BBC search facility is not always up to scratch, but I found quite a few references against "Dave Slater" and "David Slater" that were definitely me, a few that may not have been, and some that surely were not. It's quite disturbing to read a news item about someone with your name who was murdered.

What a depressing thought to end on. I'm actually quite chirpy at the moment. Three weeks of holiday ahead does that for a person!