And the Classes Begin!!

Oh man. So my classes this term are:

Church History I, followed by the precept for the class (which is essentially a smaller discussion group). The professor for the class seems very brilliant and very bouncy. She quite literally hops around the room. I can already tell I'm going to be overwhelmed by all the information presented, so I'm grateful that we have the precept to break it down and figure it all out a little bit. Our reading for tomorrow's class is fairly intense; it is called The Passions of Saints Perpetua and Felicitas. It is about the visions and martydom of an early Christian woman, her slave girl, and a few Christian men with her. So, in other words, we started with the fun stuff!

Pastoral Formation is a spirituality class. I think it's going to be a good "check-in" class for the first years, where we get centered after all the academic rigor makes our heads spin. We will be studying, among other things, Wesley's 3 Simple Rules. It's about time I studied that... I'm horrible Methodist.

Study of the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament study, I won't actually be learning Hebrew. Yet.) is my Bible Study course. This class is going to be fascinating, I can tell already. I haven't done nearly enough study of the Hebrew Bible (Or First Testament, or Old Testament, or whatever else you'd like to call it.) I'm excited to wrestle with some of the challenging imagery presented in this part of the Bible.

Exegetical Skills is sort of paired with our Bible Study course. It helps create the skills for researching and understanding the Bible verses I will use when preaching. I'm pretty excited for this course, I can already tell it will lead to interesting conversations.

I have class Tuesday through Friday. I'm done by noon on Friday, so I essentially have a 3.5 day weekend. I'm sure I'll be grateful for that when I am working with a church next year. My two lecture classes (History and Hebrew Bible) are fairly good sized, about 45 students, but these are the "basics" and I know that other classes are much smaller as I move forward in my studies.

At some point I want to talk more about the people I'm meeting, the things I'm actually feeling, and all of that, but right now I'm just trying to make sure I remember to eat three times a day. It's a little crazy here at the beginning of the year! And hot. Really really hot.