Yes, there has been much to do. I still have hundreds of pages of reading each week, with papers and research thrown in, too, but somehow I have also found the time to explore some of my own interests, and in the end I have truly been enjoying myself. My book list posted here in my blog will testify to the time I have spent on my personal interests, as the "just for fun" section has more books on it than the "required readings" listed above it. My mom might be partially to blame--she bought me an "itty bitty book light" when she visited last month, and now I can lay in bed for hours reading long after everyone else has fallen asleep. Thanks, mom!
This time of Lent has been particularly productive for me, and has no doubt had a tremendous impact on the less frenetic feeling I have. Just after Ask Wednesday I again visited the monastery where I, and the other first-year Berkeley Divinity School students, had our class retreat in February. I drove up on Friday afternoon and spent the next 24 hours trying to listen to my own thoughts. I wrote pages and pages in my journal, reflecting on my life--how I spend my time, what I enjoy doing, who I feel drawn to spend more time with. This rumination helped me begin listening to where God is leading me right now. If I had to describe, in one word, this experience of prayer and reflection it would be: Alive. Alive!
Lent has always seemed like a somber, dark, lonely time of the church year, but this year I have experienced something wholly different from that. I wrote the following in my journal while I was at the monastery last month, and it has set the tone of my spiritual journey through this Lenten season:
This Lent has a wind about it. It is incubating a great awakening and sweeping out the debris and dusting off the cold and forgotten things of the past. "Wake up," it wants to say, "for I am doing a new thing."This Lent has been a time of preparation, not removal; of anticipation, not denial. I am preparing my mind and my body for a new Easter, for the re-arrival of Christ's good works in my life. In that sense, what I have taken on as Lenten practices have been about discipline, not in the sense of self-denial, but in the sense of joyful preparation and commitment. With this small shift in perspective I feel livened in body, mind, and spirit and I am awaiting the Easter celebration as a much anticipated fulfillment of the hope that is growing within me.
With Easter will come final papers, final exams, and tying up the last loose threads of my first year of seminary. Like Lent, this year has been a time of contemplation, preparation, and planting. God is indeed providing me with a rich soil out of which a Christ-centered ministry can take firm root and grow--always being nourished with God's spiritual food. Amen.
