Today I am in Columbia, SC, where later today I'll go to the Lutheran seminary for the onground intensive for the Spiritual Director's Certificate program. You might say, "Wait, didn't you already do that certificate?" Yes, I did, but alumni are invited to return once a year. I didn't go last year for a variety of reasons.
This year I wanted to go for a variety of reasons, but the biggest one is that the seminary is moving, and this will be the last intensive at the Columbia campus. I don't know what will happen to that property, but I'm fairly sure it will all be bulldozed and turned into something more commercial. I have all sorts of feelings about that, but I wanted to take this last opportunity to gather on that campus.
I also wanted to go because the curriculum looks great. Some of it I did before, like the module on Native American spirituality--it was great, and I'm looking forward to returning to the topic. Some of the material seems new. And the topic overall, that of how we discern the presence of God in our lives and how we help others to do so--it's a topic that remains interesting to me.
I'm also looking forward to seeing people along the way, grad school friends from long ago, retreat friends, and seminary friends from the certificate days (who are different from seminary friends from Wesley days).
As I've been thinking about our current situation, I'm so happy to realize how wealthy we are in friends and families who are within a 3 hour radius of our house. We had friends in South Florida, of course, but so many of them had moved away by the time we moved. And during a week like this, when tropical flooding is expected all week long in South Florida, I'm so grateful that we figured out a way to move to a safer spot, even as I miss the people we left behind.
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