Graduation and other oddities

So I graduated (again) on Saturday (07/07/07 - won't forget that date in a hurry!)
I am now David G Slater, B.Sc., B.A. (Theol.)
For those who are interested, my B.A. Theol is with majors in New Testament with Greek, and Practical Theology. I worked hard to ensure that my module choices gave me a double major or alternatively the option to choose one of two majors in my potential Honours year that I'm not now doing, including taking 30 credits more than I needed over my three years, and now they (my majors) gets very little mention. So much for Pride...
I am also trying to sort out going to Glasgow University, where I will (hopefully) get some more alphabet extracts to drag around my formal correspondance.

This is because the Kirk have accepted me as a Prospective Candidate in Training for the Ministry of Word and Sacrament, and the Presbytery of Irvine and Kilmarnock have nominated me as a full Candidate so assuming that I do all the relevant studying, attend the Candidates' Conferences, have three successful Student Placements and a fourth Probationer's Placement sustained, complete Church Law and Bible Knowledge Portfolios and probably get examined on walking with my left leg behind my right ear, I will nearly be a Church of Scotland Minister (assuming that one of the umpteen vacant charges is in agreement with myself and Cath that we are called to be their minister and minister's wife and they are called to be our charge).

But in spite of all the ifs and ands, it's been a big milestone that I have temporarily lost sight of through finishing my term, and indeed my time at ICC (you can tell I lost sight of it by the fact that it's almost 2 months after acceptance that I'm blogging it!). Before I was simply studying Theology in faith that God had called me to ministry. Now I have some sort of 'Status' in that representatives of the ?biggest denomination in Scotland (at least the biggest Protestant one, surely?) have confirmed that calling and I am 'in until I'm out' rather than being 'out until I'm in'.

This probably doesn't make a lot of sense, and isn't what I was going to post on in detail when I started. But bed is beckoning so the other oddities will have to wait. Still, at least I'm back blogging - it may not be regular or daily but I am still here. Anyone reading this who hasn't yet fallen asleep, please post to say hi.

Incidentally, I haven't come to any great conclusions about our new PM except to agree with Nick Robinson's description of him as 'Not Blair'. Which, let's face it, is a good start...

Survival or 'Thrival'?

Can't believe it's been over a month! This term was supposed to be an easier one... but I find that having more time allows more time for procrastination and plain time-wasting, as well as work expanding to fill the available (space-)time. Then of course I have tried to prioritise my family (still getting used to thinking of my wife and son under that heading instead of my mum and sisters!) - not always successfully - and there was a cold in there somewhere as well (or a series of 2 or 3 of them for spouse & sprog :-( )

Anyway, in the midst of 'end-of-term' stuff - despite lack of decent preparation, did quite well in my final Hebrew test of term, and think I've done an ok exam paper (2 hours) for Greek Text: Philippians. Now I just have to write a few thousand words about some children's songs, mostly before Friday, and I'll be fine!

But I've just been wondering - am I surviving this week (which also included a 'Personal Development Interview' as part of my C of S Ministry application) or thriving on it. I feel like I've 'survived' the two language modules rather than thrived (thriven?) as perhaps I did last term (at least in Greek - or that's how my revisionist memory records it...) but at the same time, I've been trying to depend utterly on God. I'm a long way off yet, but feel it ties in with Brother Lawrence's 'Practising the Presence of God', and have made some progress in small ways. What I wonder is, has this intention to depend on God, led to an actual 'thrival' in terms of my studies? I certainly seem to be a bit better at not being anxious in these last few weeks.

The proof of the pudding will probably be if I get this independent study work completed reasonably well. I also recently decided that perhaps I should embrace the fact that I work in what my placement supervisor calls an 'exponential' fashion - the graph of work against time shoots up as the deadline approaches! As long as I time things right, there isn't a problem!

Skype and stuff

Forgive me father for I have sinned... it has been some weeks since my last blog entry. But so much has gone on - we've covered probably 1000 miles, done the whole family/Christmas bit, put in lots of work tiling this bathroom (the completion date: possibly before the new Wembley) and even done some filing. There's still a war on paper in our house but I feel we've won a couple of skirmishes anyway. Now we're into the new term, I have Greek and Hebrew to keep up with, a possible new language to learn in a Bible Translation course and/or an independent study course to decide on relating to worship/music/childrens' ministry, and of course my placement which will now include further reading, preaching (next time is in less than two weeks), individual and organisational visits... Not forgetting being a husband and father.

So why on earth did I spend most of yesterday downloading and getting started with Skype? OK so it's really cool, easy to use and basically free. Ok so now at least one of Peter's aunties can see him on screen (although not last night because he was asleep by the time I got the video working!). Ok so I had a great (free) chat with a cousin in Norway! And ok, so the search facility in the 'phone directory' is really quite good. But apart from all that, what have the Romans ever done for us? Seriously, it did use up time better spent doing Hebrew (although I got it done on the train) - and seriously, I do like it as a piece of software. I still have to work on this arcane skill called time management...

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!