Have I talked about going to college at all here yet? Only the merest of mentions.  Okay.  Well as you may or may not know, this year I am starting a Diploma of Bible and Youth Ministry at Moore Theological College (hereafter MTC).  Why?  I love God.  I love learning.  I love being involved in ministry at church.  I love children and young people.  I wanted to get a firmer foundation and greater knowledge in all these areas.  I wanted to know God better and love him more.  I wanted to be well equipped for whatever work he has in store for me, in whatever capacity that might be.

Last year at church, our pastor Kurt interviewed Nick, who was just finishing year 12.  He talked about his plans for the future, had worked out that he wanted to be in ministry and mapped out the steps he would take to get there over the next several years.  He was so sure and so determined and passionate about it.  And although Kurt laughed and said that the details of Nick’s plans change from week to week, the essence was there - he wanted to work for God and would take the necessary steps to get there.  Kurt challenged us by saying that in the secular world we talk a lot about 5 year plans and projections for the future, but how often do we do that personally, in our Christian lives?

So that night I prayed and prayed and prayed that God would help me work out what I was doing and where he wanted me to be.  And the next morning the thought rang in my head, clear as a bell: go to theological college.

This is momentous mainly because I have been avoiding doing so for a long time.  For years people have been saying to me, “so have you thought about going to college?” And each time I’d screw up my face and shake my head.  It’s not that I had anything against being theologically trained at all ("some of my best friends are college students!") but there seemed too many barriers to me doing it.  Of course they were self-imposed barriers, but I had to get over them first.  Well, really, God had to show me that they weren’t really barriers at all.

Barrier 1: I didn’t think I could cope studying full time again
Degrees at Moore are interesting and exciting, but also academically rigorous.  There is a huge workload it seems, and all the friends I’ve had go through college have developed that strange, haunted, “I have a Greek assignment due this week” kind of look about them.  They also develop a passion for obscure board games.  They read, read, read.  They wax lyrical about all sorts of theological concepts that make absolutely no sense to me.  They read some more.  They go into complete lock down around exam time.  Then they disappear during the holidays to Somewhere That Isn’t Newtown to lick their wounds and prepare for another term.  Well that’s how it seemed sometimes anyway.  I love learning but didn’t know if I had it in me to do four years of such intense study and didn’t think I wanted to study full time.  And then MTC announced that in 2010 you could take all of their courses part time.  And that one of their diplomas had a youth ministry focus. 

Barrier: destroyed!

Barrier 2: I didn’t want to do MTS
Working at AFES for seven years I saw many people tread the path of two-years-of-MTS-and-then-four-years-of-college (MTS stands for the Ministry Training Strategy and basically chucks you in the deep end of ‘ministry’ as an apprentice.  Guan is in the middle of a fantastic diary series for The Briefing about his first year as a ministry apprentice at UNSW.  Recommended reading!).  MTS is extremely valuable and a life changing experience for everyone who does it; it shows you your strengths and weaknesses and gives you a taste for what a life in ministry is like. But I just didn’t want to do it.  Which is ridiculous, because in no way now or ever has MTS been a prerequisite for college.  It’s often a recommended step, but not essential.

Barrier: destroyed! (or completely imaginary in the first place!)

Barrier 3: I didn’t want to live in
Living in community is one of the big things about Moore.  It seems half of Newtown is either owned by the college or occupied by its students (and there are also pockets of MTC community in Stanmore, north Parramatta and Croydon Park).  Families get to live in terrace houses or flats, single men live in John Chapman House and single women live in Carillon House.  I never wanted to live at residential college when I was at secular uni and although I know living in community is a huge bonus for building relationship and is very convenient for actually being at college, I didn’t think I would cope too well with it.  Being a 30-something single woman too...it’s not like I’m a 20 year old leaving the family home to go to college.  It would cause a major upheaval for not just me, but mum too (who I live with), as she wouldn’t be able to keep living where we do.  When I met with Tara, the Dean of Women, last year, she said being a part time student I wouldn’t have to live in.

Barrier: destroyed!

Barrier 4: I couldn’t afford it
People I know have saved up heaps of money before they go to college.  I have no savings.  I am crap with money.  I wouldn’t be able to afford living expenses let alone the fees if I didn’t work.  A few years ago college got accredited to be able to offer FEE-HELP from the government.  And attending part time means I can still do my freelance design/transcribing/whatever work.  It will be a busy year and I’ll need to be on top of my time management, but it is possible.

Barrier: destroyed!

Barrier 5: My depression
Well this one is an ongoing one.  But I am not the first and certainly not the last depressive person who will go to MTC.  Being part of a Christian community will be valuable; I know people will be loving and caring.  Part timers aren’t required to, but we are encouraged to join the First Year Groups - these are small groups of people in first year that you get to know and pray with, so hopefully you can help support one another through college and you don’t struggle through your problems on your own. This will alleviate some of the fear I had of disappearing into a giant pool of people like I did in my first years at UNSW...though I like to think I have matured a bit since then!  Also, Tara encouraged me to take things at my own pace, to ask for help if I needed it.  With the part time study there is no pressure to finish in a certain timeframe so I can slow things right down if it seems like I’m not coping.

Also large groups of people exhaust me.  Getting to know people is a tiring process, though ultimately rewarding.  I just have to be aware that for the next couple of months I’m probably going to be a bit strung out and will need to guard my rest!  This weekend is the First Year Weekend Away, where we all get together to learn more about college life, hang out with one another and hopefully develop stronger relationships.  I find weekends away hard work even when it’s with people I already know quite well (I need a lot of alone time to recharge).  I made the executive decision that I wouldn’t go down tonight (Friday) but would go down on Saturday morning.  That way I’m only away for one night.  Man I sound like such a wuss.  But I think it’s mainly self-protective wussery.  I will try very hard not to let it be an excuse that stops me from getting involved in things, because I know as a part time student I’ll probably have to try a bit harder to feel included (just because everyone else is moving through twice as fast!).

Barrier: in the process of being destroyed.  Gently.

Why did I ever doubt that God knows what’s best for me?  He totally cleared the path for me; I just had to get out of my own way so I could see it.  I’m very excited about starting classes.  For the first two terms I’ll be doing classes in Old Testament and Biblical Theology.  The second two terms I will continue Old Testament and start Foundations in Youth Ministry.  I am starting to feel my brain waking up after what seems like a really long time on hiatus.

Please pray for me this year!  And ultimately that God would continue to be glorified through the many men and women who go through Moore (and other theological colleges).

In which the author possibly reads too much into a movie. (Heads up: probably an oversharing post, but then that’s what you’ve come to expect from me, right?)

Douglas: Will you keep out all the sadness?
Max: I have a sadness-shield that keeps out all the sadness, and it’s big enough for all of us.

I’ve been feeling very melancholy over the last few days.  Probably being uncomfortable in the heat doesn’t help, but I haven’t been sleeping too well either and when I do sleep, I have strange dreams about past events and running away from people and lots of generally unsettling stuff.  Since seeing my counsellor yesterday I’ve been trying to piece it together and work out how to move through this particular patch.  The type of therapy she does is narrative therapy, which I guess is why I go off into stories about my past so often when I’m trying to work all this stuff out.  But it’s more about seeing what those past stories were and trying to come up with a new story.  More like a choose-your-own-adventure than an entirely predictable plot.

Anyway, where was I?

This week I went to see Where the Wild Things Are at the Moonlight Cinema with Megan and Lachy and greatly enjoyed it but also found it just tipped the melancholy over the edge, the aching lump in my chest melted and I spent the last third of the film with tears running down my face.  While there was a lot of joy - I especially loved Max declaring that they would all sleep in “a real pile!” and how rambunctious they all were - there was just a vein of sadness running through it.  The movie seemed to perfectly capture something of the chaos, powerlessness and confusion of fractured family relationships.  There was the initial set up of Max being frustrated and angry about all the change happening in his life, the pain of being left behind by his sister (and absent father), the feeling of being ignored and then lashing out at his loving mother.  Then there was the terrible sadness in the relationships between the Wild Things, especially between Carol and KW, with Carol’s violent destructiveness as a response to things that hurt him emotionally, and KW’s habit of leaving when things got difficult.

I’m sure most people could watch WTWTA without going into that dimension of it too deeply, but while it is based on Maurice Sendak’s children’s book, it’s not a movie for kids necessarily.  It just happened to hit me hard (and unexpectedly) and to stir up things in me that lie dormant most of the time but occasionally get pulled to the surface.  I suppose I have always had a subconscious fear of change and being left.  I hate it when friends move on without me, or when people go into new phases of life where I can’t follow.  I still haven’t worked out how to navigate family relationships (and I don’t suppose anyone ever really does).

It doesn’t take a trained psychologist to see that the genesis of that is in the events of my childhood; moving overseas and around a lot as a kid, always feeling like I was the new kid at school, seeing my dad go away on business more often than not (there was one year when I was in high school that he was overseas for longer than he was at home).  And then of course, the gradual erosion of our family unit and my parents’ eventual divorce and having to leave the ‘family home’ (not having the physical place of a ‘family home’ to go back to is quite a big ache in my heart, even though I recognise we make our own homes and the one I have with mum at the moment is the closest to that kind of thing I’ve had since I finished high school).  That’s not to say I wasn’t loved, because I knew I was (and still am), but these things all added up to quite a destabilising force in my development.

I wouldn’t have said I was doing it at the time, but once everything fell apart, in the chaos and brokenness of my home life I ran from the only thing that was left intact from all the upheaval - God.  I thought I could make a better job of ruling my life since it had been a disaster up until that point.  But I was a bit like Max, who comes to realise that even when making yourself king of a wild land and trying to build a perfect fort where “only the things you want to happen, would happen”, there is no place where everything and everyone is perfect. Relationships are still hard.  People still hurt one another, even if they don’t mean to (and sometimes they do mean to).  And I discovered that in some very hard ways.

But without a doubt the best discovery from my time in the wild was how much I needed God.  It was a very, very painful thing to finally see how powerless I was, how futile it was to try and fix things that were irreparably broken or to just try and annihilate them further so I didn’t have to face them (I did identify with Carol’s destructiveness!).  Being shown my mess of a life for what it was, and having God say to me “I still love you - I always have” was the most powerful thing that has ever or will ever happen to me.  I cling to that every day.  That’s not to say I still don’t feel the pain of broken relationships, the sadness of loss and loneliness, but the important thing now is that there is more than just oblivion to look forward to.  I live in the light of that truth, that Jesus came to fix everything that couldn’t be fixed, that he forgave me for my wilful, brattish and hurtful behaviour, and that I’m going to be with him in heaven one day.

Every time anyone reads Revelation 21:1-5 I want to stand up and cheer.  This is better than any fort you could build on earth:

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”

He who was seated on the throne said, “I am making everything new!” Then he said, “Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.”

The story of my life has been profoundly changed by knowing God.  For that I am eternally grateful.

I liked this para from my Bible notes last night, on Psalm 76:

As in most of the Bible’s poetry, form brilliantly reinforces theme and makes for one harmonious whole.  At the very centre of this poem, with 41 Hebrew words before and after them, are three words that can be translated ‘You, awesome You!’ ‘Awesome’ has become a devalued word these days.  In truth it is a quality that sends us to our knees before the Lord (v7), and calls for a response of the deepest commitment (v11).  Our experience of exodus, of being brought from darkness into light, of being nobodies who are now somebodies because of God’s saving action, is all ‘ in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you’ (1 Peter 2:9) - in both speech and countercultural living.

I find summer an odd time.  Part of me likes it - the longer days, the bright light - but most of me thinks I’m not really built for it.  I do like going to the water, and I like swimming, but I’m not really one who feels comfortable lying around in my swimmers all afternoon, soaking up the sun, being out and about in the heat.  Maybe I was for a short time when I was a teenager...but then we had a pool at our house then so it was easier to achieve that kind of feel without actually having to go out in public.  Actually as a kid, growing up in the tropics, I think I did nothing but swim and play in the sun.  My skin was nut brown, to wit:

That was me, age 9 and living in Port Moresby, PNG.  I spent as much time as I could out of doors, and a lot of that submerged in a pool.

I much prefer autumn, when the days are still pleasant but the evenings are cool, when the humidity drops.  I like being able to wear layers, nice jackets and scarves.  It’s easier to feel well put together when you have layers; when all you have is a swimming costume there’s a lot less to work with.

That said, summer in Sydney is always an interesting time.  There’s a lot going on, entertainment-wise.  The Sydney Festival starts tonight, and January is usually dotted throughout with great music, theatre and performance art.  Karen, Ben and I saw Andrew Bird at the Opera House last week, which was spellbindingly wonderful and made me want to do nothing but play music forever (though of course I haven’t played a skerrick since then...huh).  Going to check out the Festival First Night tonight, with no plan but just to wander through the city and see what’s going on.  Guan, M, mum and I are going to see The Arrival next week, based on Shaun Tan’s beautiful book and at the Carriageworks, fast becoming one of my favourite venues.  And when Karen returns from overseas, we’ll go and hear Bernstein’s Candide at the Domain.  Lots to look forward to!

But mostly all I feel like doing is lying around and reading.  Which is okay if you’re on holidays, but being a freelancer and working at home is problematic in that regard.  I was planning to take time off and go somewhere, but hampered by lack of money and a bit of a health hiccup, I didn’t.  And so the days are a strange combination of seeing people, going out and doing things, plugging away at work I have on the boil and feeling vaguely listless.  I keep losing track of what day it is.

And now...I don’t know how to end this disjointed post, so I’ll just stop.  Hope you’re enjoying your summer!  (and if you’re in the northern hemisphere, I hope you’re surviving your snowy winter!)

They say a poor workman blames his tools.  Does the same apply to weight loss?  I was using one set of scales, which I thought were fairly reliable.  I then did some stuff on the Wii Fit and it gave me a measurement that varied by 9 kilos.  Then I remembered mum had another set of scales in the bathroom so I tried them, and they were somewhere in between the other two measurements.  We don’t have anything we reliably know the weight of to test the scales with but man...you’d expect a discrepancy of a kilo or so maybe, but 9 kilos?!

All I know is it would have looked a lot better if I’d started my measurements using the Wii Fit.