Study day

The aim of the first study day was to "Engage more purposefully with New Testament text". Andy - the amazingly charismatic and captivating lecturer who has put together this,our first module - led us to the most frequent command in the Bible. Know what it is? DO NOT BE AFRAID. Ok, so I could [try] to stop being terrified of the assignment. During the day we talked about the assignment, which is to be an Exegesis of a passage of NT text. Exegesis means to "draw out" and we had done an exercise in it, using a model given to us, in our first group session. We did some more practising on the study day and it made it all a lot less scary and a bit more doable. Andy told us as part of the day that there are lots more examples of exegesis and I made myself a note to look for more... It was such a good study day and good to be with people from the other study groups too.

Session two...

This week the notes I wrote down (having managed to prepare more fully this time, although the two hours I put aside for that didn't really cut it...) are: Matt 17: The Transfiguration. Moses = the Law Elijah = the Prophets. Peter, James and John: always those three!!! I learn well from little "nuggets": the have a great impact on me and make sense of things. Some of the YouTube clips in the prep have been quite long this week and I found them hard to concentrate on. This week before the session I also saw my cover, who is really excited about this course as she has never meet anyone doing "this kind of thing" before and says I light up when I talk about it. In our session she mentioned The Serenity Prayer and I was reminded of it. God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; Courage to change the things I can; And wisdom to know the difference. (Niebuhr) We talked about knowing my limitations (and picking my battles where parenting is concerned); modifying my expectations of myself; and peace with my humanity... I'm a little less clear on the meaning of the latter but I'm working on it...

Session one...

This week we had our first group session. I think it's fair to say that we were all quite apprehensive... There are six of us in our group; plus a BSL interpreter; plus our two facilitators, S and J. There had been some teething problems with preparing for this evening, as not everyone had been able to access 'block's for the resources,or in my case hadn't been able to find the resources even though I was logged in successfully! So we got to know each other a little; moved the room round and tried to establish some ground rules. One of my colleagues very kindly went to photocopy all the resources she had magically been able to find on the website and we managed to find our way through the session; me writing myself a lengthy "to do/read/watch" list for the coming week... This is going to be tough. But a lot of fun.