Orientation Week

What a week this has been. I was remarking earlier today to a seminary friend that history will record something miraculous: in the week before Labor Day 2011, I will have attended church five times. That's right, five times in one week: two Pentecostal gospel services, a standard mainline Protestant MCC-ish service, a Taizé service, and a nearly indescribable service called Awaken that was designed by three second-year MDiv classmates. More on the impact of Awaken, later.

And I gotta tell ya... it works for me. I find that the more time I spend in "church mode," the more normal it feels. And the more time I want to spend in church mode. God has truly worked miracles in me this week; I know now, clear as day, that the Holy Spirit has been fixing the cracks in this broken vessel from inside... and the Spirit has even been fixing cracks I didn't know I had. Δόξα εν υψίστοις Θεώ!

I just re-read the last entry I uploaded to this blog before orientation began; I got chills from its prescience. A new truth has appeared... seven months ago my friend Gina and I put forth the thought that PSR wouldn't know what had hit it this fall when we started our core MDiv studies; this remains true. However, I had tacitly made the assumption that Gina and I would be prime-movers in such a shift; I am now convinced that God had even greater things planned all along:

The bottom-line is that God has drawn a staggeringly beautiful group of people to PSR in order to begin their studies this fall. I do not even know where to begin; there were honestly only one or two new students at the entire orientation who gave me that not-so-fresh feeling and even those few people did not trigger the kind of ickies that were triggered in me by some of the students I met last year. There are two guys on whom I have a crush that will never go anywhere because they are straight, and there is another guy on whom I have a crush that will likely never go anywhere because even though he is gay he is also like 25 years old... and yet, this is all perfectly fine because I just do not know how I would have the time or the emotional bandwidth for a relationship at this point:

A core reason is that my Sobriety Ministry at COR-SF will start in less than two weeks, and also because the Holy Spirit has moved me to work with Gina to design a new series of worship services following in the lead of what my now-second-year MDiv classmates have done with their Awaken service design. This series of services will operate under the name Reconciliation... styled in the Greek as ΣΥΝΔΙΑΛΛΑΓΉ (Sūndēăllăghé)... and whose tag-line is Giving Voice To The Silenced.

God is most definitely still speaking. AMHN.