27.08.07
Posted in Church/Ministry, Journal at 1:48 pm by Sarah
Yay! Exam over!
I was a bit stressed since I didn’t have time to study from Thursday until Sunday morning… although possibly not as stressed as H who also had to prepare and deliver a bible talk on Saturday to our Mission team.
Speaking of which, I’m really excited about mission this year. We’re morphing from a ‘beach mission’ to a ‘rural mission’ of sorts. Basically it means we’ve switched our target market (for want of a better word) to locals rather than campers. It makes alot of sense. Kids are more likely to come if they’re bored at home doing nothing, rather than on holidays with all sorts of exciting things to do.
This also mean some arguably positive changes. We are shifting the time to mid January – and we get a proper Christmas! We will be operating out of a school and staying at another school i.e. no tents! I think possibly the only drawback of this is that there is no team bonding time during set up and pack up.
Eeenyway… the exam was actually pretty good. I’d spent the morning doing practise exam questions – and thankfully the actual exam questions were pretty similar. I just downloaded the essay plans out of my brain in the first ten minutes and spent the rest of the time formulating essays. I even avoided my mortal enemy: English Prayer Book History!
It’s likely I’ll be doing New Testament 1 next – which will be breath of fresh air. Pure bible! Yay!
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22.08.07
Posted in Links, Projects at 5:43 pm by Sarah
Here is a cool link on fusing old plastic bags together to create material to make… whatever!!
I am so doing this…
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21.08.07
Posted in Church/Ministry, Journal at 1:54 pm by Sarah
Instead of running bible studies – our congregation run PTC courses.
It’s a great idea - using Moore college’s material and training up people (who would never have even thought of going to bible college) in the Bible. We are doing ‘Christian Worship’ at the moment. It’s been alot more difficult doing a topical subject… which brings me to my gripe…
‘Christian Worship’, perhaps surprisingly, contains a certain amount of history. History of liturgy to be exact. I find history incredibly frustrating. It is completely un-summarisable!! You can’t sum it up in a formula, or a sentence. It’s date after fact after date. yuk. Give me some old-fashioned Bible and I’ll be right.
I was struggling my way through it (I might have been having a small tantrum as well:) ) last night when Haoran actually put his finger on it. It’s about learning what you don’t care about. This is actually pretty hard. I mean, seriously, does it really matter how many revisions there were to the English Prayer book and how many versions of this particular prayer they put in?? When I was doing ‘Introduction to the Bible’ things were much easier, this was straight Bible stuff, easy to learn because I cared about it.
I’m sure it’ll all make sense in the end. In the meantime I’ll try and muscle my way through the history bits and hope that they set some good questions!!
(Exam is on Sunday!!!!!)
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18.08.07
Posted in Journal, Projects at 8:50 pm by Sarah
After months of being squished into a little corner.. and having the sewing machine on a coffee table.. and operating said sewing machine with my knee on the pedal…. this little addition is a very welcome relief! Read the rest of this entry »
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17.08.07
Posted in Links at 11:55 am by Sarah
John Dickson blogs on smh!!!
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14.08.07
Posted in Church/Ministry, Journal at 11:00 am by Sarah
Following on from Haoran’s comments on the talks we’ve been listening to by Dr Arch Hart…
Dr Arch is very pleasant to listen to. He’s a 70-something with a lovely South African accent and very kindly tone.
I am honestly finding it amazing how relevant and important understanding your own psycology is. In particular, his explanation on depression was very helpful.
I never pretended to know much about it, but understanding the medical reasons behind clinical depression, the signs and symptoms, makes so much sense.
His explanation of reactive depression completely blew me away. This is the more common form of depression, everyone has it at one time or another, when life throws a crisis/loss at you. I guess in particular for Christians, we often try to hold reactive depression back. I know that’s definately my first reaction. We feel guilty – we shouldn’t be unhappy, we should be joyful - there are heaps of people worse off – this world is temporary and I shouldn’t be grieving a loss of something that doesn’t matter in eternity.
Dr Arch clears it all up. He says that reactive depression is a healing process. The brain is trying to heal your pain, to help you forget. It actually a very important part of moving on! Holding it back makes it worse. He also talks about ‘forced growth’ where God uses bad situations to help you grow and mature in him. This wasn’t new to me, but it was a good reminder.
An aside: We have been doing Habbakuk at church and recently Haoran asked whether he could interview me in view of talking to someone who had experienced some sort of suffering – in my case – cancer.
Honestly, I felt like the biggest, fattest fraud. Sure, I had cancer- that big dirty word. But my doctor said it was the best cancer to have. It was easily contained and cured. It wasn’t life-threatening. Of course there was the inconvience of surgery and radio therapy… but was that suffering? When asked how I dealt with the situation I almost shrugged..
2 years later I still don’t have a clue why this experience didn’t faze me. Was it friends and family’s support…. was it… well it was definately God.
More on Dr Arch soon – I still have 4 or so CD’s to go!
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09.08.07
Posted in Links at 10:40 am by Sarah
One of the best headlines I’ve heard in a while….
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08.08.07
Posted in Journal at 2:50 pm by Sarah
It so happens that my workplace is one of those places where we are constantly welcoming new people and farewelling old ones. We are a good-sized national company, and it might just be that there are more people to come and go… but I generally find this a bit unsettling.
A good example is the desk right next to me. I have been here for almost 18 months, and in that time, 4 people have occupied that space. We expect the next one in a week. Perhaps it’s like the cursed position of ‘Defense Against the Dark Arts’ teacher*.. except worse.
And yesterday I found out that due to some department reshuffles… I am going to be the only girl in my department! This basically means no one to chat to for me, since the guys in my department (all being very nice) mostly talk about footy tipping – if they talk at all. Not conjusive to sanity.
Ah well.. lunchtime blogging it is..
* Can you tell I’ve been reading HP? I read 5 and 6 recently to rev up for 7… the weekend couldn’t come sooner!
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04.08.07
Posted in Projects at 11:50 am by Sarah
A few weeks ago I asked my friend to teach me crochet… and I got a little bit obsessed.
The thing is, I find it easier to do than knitting – there’s more options, and you can cover up your mistakes. And I’m just really enjoying it! Of course – there’s also the fact that my mother-in-law offloaded a full garbage bag full of yarn to me a while ago – so now I have a fun use for it!
So the first project was a baby blanket for a little girl that arrived last week.
And a beanie – for which I actually had to interpret a pattern – not so easy…. but I was kinda happy with the results..
Hopefully It will fit my Dad – and it won’t look too ‘metro’…..:)
Anyway – I’m off to make a heffalump… don’t ask!
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