It is Labor Day weekend, and I am already a solid week into this new semester at Seminary. Getting here was an adventure, and I had to hit the ground running, but I'm beginning to finally feel settled.
I finished out CPE stongly, I believe, growing to love the job more and more every day. There were crazy days and easy days, and on my last day of actual work, I was given both the regular on-call pager and the trauma pager for a couple of hours during the Resident's graduation celebration, and of course that would be when two traumas, one death, and one family conflict would come in all at once. I loved it. I feel like I was really able to grow into my pastoral identity over the course of the summer, and I am so glad for how I spent it. I was excited by how much I felt that I could be a minister, and by how much I learned over the summer.
Outside of CPE, I had a minor hiccup just at the end of the summer. I was driving home from my last visit with Silas one Sunday evening, when my car started to make a funny clicking noise. I mentioned this to my parents, and my mom drove me to work in the morning so she could take my car into our mechanic and get it checked out. We assumed it wouldn't be a big deal, until the car died before it made the two mile trip to the mechanic. Something or other happened, which led to what was deemed by the people working on it "catastrophic engine failure." The good news was that my car was still under warranty and now she has a shiny new engine. The bad news is she wasn't going to be ready in time to get my mom and I back to Ohio so she could catch her flight out of town. So, we got the idea to take my dad's car and then trade halfway between after awhile. My mom and I made our long drive back to Ohio, and we'll be meeting somewhere in Tennessee later on in order to trade cars back. We're also hoping this is the end of my bad luck with cars.
When I got back to Ohio, I hit the ground running. I began my job as Sacristan by showing up and being asked to be a crucifer for the first service of the term. Then there were long meetings with Karen and Kristen, the worship life coordinator and my fellow sacristan to begin to figure out how we would work things over the upcoming year. I'm enjoying the job immensely already, and I've already begun to write a worship service for the upcoming week.
I've also already gotten started on classes, even before I was able to get all my school supplies organized for them. This semester I'm taking Systematic Theology, Old Testament 2, Preaching, Lutheran Confessions, and Christian Perspectives on Other Religions. I'm pretty excited about all of them already, especially Systematic Theology, which surprised me a little bit. I think that I am really beginning to get into the interesting stuff of seminary this year, and I think it will be a good year.
I'm glad to be back here, as much as I enjoyed being in Texas over the summer. I'm beginning to get to know the new people at the seminary, and reconnecting with my friends. I'm already feeling back into the swing of things and George is even well settled. He had an adventure his first day back by getting out when my mom and I were going to be gone awhile, but he got to stay in one of my friends apartments until we got back. Today George helped me to put together a bookcase, which I can't wait to fill up with my overflowing books. I'm still working on getting my apartment reorganized, and keeping up with my dishes (I already miss having a dishwasher again) but I've got one more holiday day of the weekend to get to it.
I'll be blogging more regularly now that I'm back on a normal schedule, so keep an eye here for updates on my Middler year at Trinity!
