Church, Regent, and the Everyday

These shots are from after church this morning. Cora looked so cute in her little gray jumper dress and navy pea coat!

My wireless on my laptop has fizzled. I can either hook up by cord that limits me to one location at our house--on one side of our couch that's not my favorite--or use David's laptop when it's sitting around. The extra effort for e-mail, Facebook, blogging, etc. means not very much correspondence with friends, but much greater productivity in my work and household. Now when I go to the Regent library, I actually have to just work and can't get caught up in returning e-mails or checking friend's blogs. But it is also partly responsible for my own irregularity. Hopefully at Christmas time it will get fixed when we're home in the States.

Cora's Grammie, Dave's mom, is here visiting. She is here for two weeks altogether, and my life has so much more space, it's lovely! It's so fun to go to the library for the afternoon and come home to a hot chicken potpie and a happy Cora with her beautiful art projects and a clean house. We have friends here whose mother lives with them and cares for their toddler while they both study. We're thinking this is a really good situation. Whatever happened to multi-generational households, anyway? Compared to the hectic way our lives usually run, this feels so peaceful. Perhaps we just try to cram too much into life. I've been thinking a lot lately about our pace and what I might do to alleviate it a bit. The only thing that comes to mind is to quit studies and be a stay-at-home mom, especially with Baby Girl on the way. But then when I think about it and consider it, it just doesn't feel right. Studying alongside David does feel right. God is moving and changing us in great ways, and it just has to be a mutual thing right now. I can't imagine it any other way. I'm beginning to recognize that the guilt I put on myself for allowing the house to get dirty or serving thrown together meals or not giving Cora as much time as I'd like is really falling prey to other's expectations for the "good woman", not a Godly guilt over being misaligned with God's will.

Right now, our university lives are hitting the particularly busy time of the semester, which is why it's been AMAZING to have the extra hands. My big research paper for Christian Thought and Culture is due next week, so I've been trying to synthesize the very difficult subject of the early church Christological controversy over Monophysitism, or the idea that Christ has only one nature. The Council of Chalcedon determined the orthodox Christian view that Christ has two natures, human and divine, within his one divine person. By emphasizing Christ's divine nature over his human, this 5th and 6th century movement ended up with a false and unbalanced conception of Christ. For them, the predominance on the complete and perfect union of both natures into one within Christ in the incarnation was the basis for the deification of humanity. I'm loving it, because studying these Christological heresies of the early centuries is not just studying dead relics; an awareness and knowledge of them is crucial in order to be discerning of where they crop up today, which they do. You can see how an unbalanced emphasis on Christ's deity could lead to some theological errors: a dualistic view of the material and spiritual where the value of the world (beauty, practical everyday life, the physical welfare of humanity) is viewed negatively, whereas mysticism and ascetic monaticism is elevated; a misunderstanding of Christ's present humanity and his intercession for us in heaven; an obscuring of the extent of Christ's sufferings and how he can identify with us.

Anyway, I get a little excited about this stuff, but my original point was just to tell you a bit about what Dave and I are working on. My "Women's Faith and Development" class is moving along at a fast clip; it's like a bookclub, only one that meets every single week. So I have to read a book and write an interactive paper on it each week, and then we spend the classtime, 10 amazing women and a fantastic teacher, in lively discussion. Dave has one particularly intense class, Hermeneutics, which also is a paper-a-week class on the various ways of interpreting the Bible. His other ones are a bit more moderate: Everyday Spirituality bringing together the way we can find God in the ordinary of life; and Christian Education and Equipping, a course by one of our favorite professors, the well-known pastor and speaker Darryl Johnson. For that course he has to write his own Bible study course--he's working on one on John 14. He also just completed a huge group project critiquing and analyzing a study course. His group chose Christianity Explored. Dave was elected to the leadership role of the group, which also meant he carried the bulk of the weight. So that's our Regent life.

Dave is also doing his Supervised Ministry for his MDiv degree at our church, Dunbar Heights Baptist. He is predominantly involved with worship. He has put together what looks to be an amazing worship night next Sunday night, getting all kinds of people involved from the church to lead short creative segments which will help the congregation understand the way we can worship through our work, hobbies, and all of life. He has put a lot of energy into this, and it looks like it's going to be really exciting. He's also hugely involved in all of the Advent preparations, conducting a choir (in which I'm singing) and other special music, writing Advent liturgy, etc. Now he's also started up an after-service prayer ministry. He's really enjoying being a part of the church leadership team, feeling like this is really where God has given him passion and gifts.

Well, that's just a taste, perhaps more of a taste than you wanted, of what this semester is looking like for us right now.