All Over Again

It's amazing how quickly the time goes. It doesn't seem like a year since we were eagerly waiting for the Curacy List to see where we may well have been serving after ordination. And yet, it must be, because the current final year students are waiting on the List to be published today. To read some of their thoughts, you can check out what both Robert and Ruth are saying.

Just like last year - please be praying for these guys - there are 14 students, so it's a lot bigger than our class. Yet even now, God knows where they will be working - and will accomplish His purposes for His Kingdom and their lives. I'm just glad that we're settled here and not having to go through any appointments process for another few years at least!

Curacy News

St Elizabeth's Church, Dundonald
Originally uploaded by Gary McMurray.

Just a quick post to say that I've been offered (and am accepting!) the Curacy in St Elizabeth's Church, Dundonald. We got the news at about 4pm, then it was a lot of ringing and texting to tell people. After heading out for dinner, I came up the road home.

A big thank you to all those who have been praying for me - please continue to pray for those who have not yet been placed.

Waiting...

It's THE afternoon. Carmen and me are in College waiting to see where our Curacies will be. I'm reminded of the line from the hymn 'The Church's one foundation':

'Yet saints their watch are keeping, their cry goes up, "How long?"'

Hopefully we'll know soon!

Interviews, Check! Essays, Check!

College life at the minute seems like one big checklist of things to be completed, all by last Tuesday, if you please. Last night, I had my final interview of the Curacy List, and it seemed to go quite well. We'll see next Thursday when the preferences are brought together and the promises of offers are made.

Tonight I managed to get the final essay of the first semester finished off. Yes, I know that we're already into the second semester, but our Anglicanism essay had a nice deadline of this Friday coming. So that's the first batch of essays done.

Looking ahead, the next items on the checklist are finding out what parishes we'll be working in (Thursday week), five more essays (so far three for March and two for after the Easter holidays in April), and the Major Integrated Project - more commonly known around here as the dissertation. It's due in for the 31st March, all nicely bound and presented, but the week before a certain crowd of ordinands will be touring Pisa and Florence, so we'll need to have them finished before we jet off.

And that will be all the work needed for college, except for the 'dreaded E word' - exams. But we'll not worry about them just yet. Sure they're ages away!

Interviews

I've had four interviews over the past two days in the Curacy List. Tough questions, and enjoyable chats with rectors I didn't know beforehand. In some senses it's strange having interviews for parishes I hadn't looked at or been interested in. A bit like having a job interview for a job you don't want? But it's all part of the process, and will provide us with some more places to think about when we come to make our one-two-three preferences next week. For now though, there's one more interview on Monday - until then I intend to have a relaxing weekend!

Preparation and Protestants

It never really stops in college. It's the night before the first of the interview in the Curacy appointments process, and I've been sitting researching an essay, for the most part. The essay is for Anglicanism, and I'm looking at the Preamble and Declaration of 1870. It was the Church of Ireland preparing for disestablishment (that is, freedom from state control, and being seen as a wing of the civil service), and defining itself.

Stating clearly what it was, and was not. An interesting document, and one of the few places in the Church of Ireland's formularies (maybe even the formularies of the entire Anglican Communion) where the Church is question is defined as 'a reformed and Protestant Church.' Elsewhere, the phrasing would be 'catholic and reformed' but here, they went full kilter for the declaration that the Church of Ireland was protestant.

While the declaration talks about a lot more, I think I'm going to focus in on the self-identity of the Church, looking at the background to this statement, and also what relevance it has for the Church of Ireland of today.

Prayers, as always, greatly appreciated for the interviews tomorrow, Friday and Monday. Oh, and by the way, my darling has summarised our last few months in great style at her blog in a post entitled 'The road less travelled.'

Piecing It Together

Just a very quick post. Since my last updates on the Curacy List etc, there have been some exciting developments. We're now less than a week away until the interviews. I'm having four interviews - two on Thursday, one on Friday, and one on Monday, and am looking forward to them.

However, the most exciting news is that Lynsey is coming home. Yes, that's right, she has been accepted for a job in Northern Ireland! Now we she has to rank the available possibilities and hope that the hospitals and parishes are near each other. But it's great that she has got into Northern Ireland - as someone said, the pieces of the jigsaw are all coming together well!

Keep praying for us, as we make important choices in the coming weeks.

Back to Porridge

I'm back in Dublin once again, and the regular routine begins tomorrow, with a 9 o'clock lecture in Trinity. Ouch! I've said this before, but where did those four weeks of holidays go?

Was up early this morning taking Lynsey back to Aldergrove for her flight to Edinburgh, then visited a church on the curacy list. This afternoon I took mum and dad to a funeral at mum's home church - while they were at it I went for a wee drive and then sat reading - finished off Alistair McGrath's response to Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, which is appropriately titled The Dawkins Delusion.

The journey down to Dublin was rough enough - and not just because of the company (only joking Robert!). There was heavy rain the whole way from Banbridge to south of the Boyne, but it isn't too bad here.

So where do we go from here? Tomorrow starts the Hillary Term (or is it Hilary Term?), which runs until the first week of March and our next holidays. All in all, there are just thirteen weeks of term time left in college (with three weeks of holiday in the middle), three weeks revision, and two weeks exams, and I will be finished. Scary when you put it like that!

Most of the formal interviews on the Curacy List are next week, and then D-Day is the 31st January. So, as ever, we need your prayers! Continue to pray for us students and the rectors as we seek to discern God's call for where we should be labouring in the next three years. And pray that we will keep at the studies, with a 10,000 word dissertation due for the end of March and about 5 or 6 essays also to be written. I can see that it would be so easy to get distracted by curacies and weddings and jobs and houses and wiis and you name it!

Anyways, time for another bowl of that porridge!

The Wait is Over!

Well folks, the waiting has finished. The Curacy List (yes, another post about that!) is in our hands. Immediately after the Communion service last night we were ushered into the principal's office and given an envelope with the list of vacant parishes for us to choose from. Quite a shock actually, as we were mentally preparing ourselves for the list on Thursday. So to get it on Wednesday was surprising.

The List itself, well, it appears to be interesting - a wide range of parishes with a good geographical spread. Some that we're interested in from the off, but it'll be deciding after a lot of prayer and thinking; oh, and the chance to get the parish profiles and meet the rectors. I'm not going to publish the list online, but if I know you, I may just talk to you about it...

Yesterday was a busy day, as it turned out. Last night (not very long after the list emerged) I was down in Temple Bar at the Delirious concert. Different sort of a concert to what they would normally do - certainly not the 5000 people in the King's Hall or a couple of thousand at the Waterfront. We reckoned there was about 600 in all? Six from college went, and we enjoyed it. It seemed strange, though, singing praise in the middle of Temple Bar, with a bar at the back of the venue...

Anyways, that's my update for now. Still in Dublin tonight as we have a College Day tomorrow. More updates in the near future!

Curacy List Countdown

It's just over a week until the list of parishes that are looking Curate Assistants will be available to us. For so long the talk in college has been about possible parishes and predictions. Now it's just around the corner. The immanency was made real for me yesterday when we got the official guide to the process emailed out from the office. This is actually happening, and very soon!

It's obviously affecting me somehow - last night I was even dreaming about the list, and was amazed to discover two parishes very close to my own on it - even though one is probably too small to ever have a curate. Let's hope I'm not plagued by similar silly dreams for the next week...

Our position was even more real when Lyns submitted her job application last Thursday. Both of us seeking jobs at roughly the same time; hopefully near by each other, or the marriage will have a difficult start.

And yet we hope. God knew our situation when he brought us together. Is it too difficult for God to work out these things? Not at all. But it's not always easy waiting to see how he's going to do it.

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One other thing for this posting - a happy birthday to my darling Lynsey!