Backtracking

It is impossible to communicate any of God's sustenance in my life over the past year without first backtracking a few paces and mentioning the joy of graduating from Divinity School and being commissioned as a minister. The picture of graduation that I include here, I include not because it is any great photographic feat. In fact, it's obviously blurry. But, it reminds me of the joy with which I initially embraced this calling - the kind of joy that sustains us through pain and frustration. It is the kind of joy that can only exist in the context of community, and so I am supremely grateful for the community of people that I remember every day in the United States and for the community of people I have found here in South Africa. I have seen God's faithfulness and creativity and hope in the faces of all these people, and I will, thankfully, never be the same.

Graduation from seminary was also a moment of truth because I realized then that I had learned a lot of knowledge and an entirely new vocabulary for how to view and describe the world at school, but I would never be able to find all the experience and wisdom there that I would need to be the kind of minister Jesus calls us to be. For that, I would need a whole different kind of schooling - one that has often brought me to my knees, where, it seems, true wisdom is found.