Dawn of a new season
September is a time of new beginnings. Summer screeches to a halt and normal activities resume. Churches kick off their new ministry year with fresh programs and refreshed workers. School starts. Stylish clothes and neat bundles of sale-priced stationary signal the potential for good friendships and better grades. Basketball begins. Hockey is on the near horizon. Hopes abound.
ChristianWeek is celebrating our fading summer by resuming the bi-weekly publishing schedule (national edition only). By the time you read this, most of us will have exhausted our personal vacation time and returned to our desks, eager to pass along the new ideas and stories that arrive as regularly as the sunrise. Then, just a little later in September, we will enjoy our annual Day of Rest and Gladness, a one-day spiritual retreat for our main office staff. We believe that conscientiously bringing ourselves to attention before God is a productive way to begin our ministry year.
There are seasons in life as well, and I am gently easing into a new one by going back to school. Not full time, of course. That would tax my wee brain too severely. But I will be spending one day each week taking a course in supervised pastoral education (i.e. chaplaincy training) and an additional several hours each week learning on the job, likely in a hospital setting. This graduate study opportunity is being offered through the faculty of Theology at the University of Winnipeg.
Thankfully, our staff is more than capable of picking up my responsibilities. In fact, managing editor Jerrad Peters has already assumed a lot of my day-to-day management functions while I've been focusing on doing more writing. I'm also eager to continue developing our network of relationships and represent ChristianWeek wherever I go.
Indeed, I am going places this fall. If all works out as planned, I will be visiting Montreal in late September, and will spend most of the second half of October at the Lausanne Consultation on World Evangelism in Cape Town, South Africa. I'll be reporting in print and online. In early December I expect to be on a press trip to Israel for one week, a guest of the Israel Government Tourist Organization. Again, expect more stories.
People who know me are not the least bit surprised to see me gravitating toward the writing and relating aspects of my job. It's a new season in my life, and I'm anticipating its promise as eagerly as a watchman awaits the dawn.
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