It is good to get on here and catch up.
What is new with me? Hmm--first of all, my younger daughter had her first baby, a boy, on Oct. 19. All was well--and the delivery was relatively easy thanks to the epidural. She invited me in to sit with her.
Her husband was hilarious. When it got down to the nitty gritty and it was time for her to start pushing, he sat next to her and held her hand--but he turned his chair so it was facing the wall! He couldn't bear to look at any of that stuff (I didn't look, either--she didn't want to be watched
*)!
Then the doctor asked if he wanted to cut the cord.
NO!!! he said!
*For my older daughter's first birth, I ended up sitting at the foot of the bed. At some point I had a bag of Cheetos and was just mechanically chomping as I watched the goings on!
My younger daughter laughed and said it was as if I was watching a horror movie!
I promised I wouldn't do that at her delivery!
I am still in school--and I'm relieved to say that I'm really enjoying this current class.
I finished up what my school offers in Hebrew, and I did learn to read in a very limited way--but there was so much memorization and the grammar was so hard. Plus my dad was really deteriorating by the end of that class. It totally frazzled me!
So then I figured I'd take Genesis-Joshua. Great, I thought. It'll do me good to get back into the Old Testament, because that is what I really love.
Wrong! There was a lot of extraneous stuff to memorize there, too--plus, with all the challenges with my dad's illness--and then his death and the aftermath--my brain couldn't absorb anything. I was like a block of wood!
I had to get an extension to make it through the class.
On one of the forums there was a brand-new mom. She asked the teaching assistant if there was a class that might be a bit less of a workload. He recommended one--and that's what I'm taking now.
I'm loving it. It is actually very interesting! It's called "Advanced Biblical Exegesis"--sounds really heavy duty, but it's not. The first six weeks are all about approaches to interpreting the Bible, and the last six weeks are about the history of interpretation.
Next week I have to do a short paper (with no footnotes) about how all the different religious environments in my life have shaped my theology.
I've been like a chameleon, so this ought to be good!
I'll go back through the thread now and do some heavy reading!
