A Week in the Life of Your Very Own M.Div. Student

Preface:
So, it’s officially official (I think): I am now repurposing this blog to ramble away not only about my trips to and from Senegal but also about my experience working towards a Master’s in Divinity at Candler School of Theology (i.e., seminary, and hence the blog name tack-on).  Kind of weird for me, I know, considering how reticent I was to even open this blog two years ago, doing so only because it was required by my study abroad program.  And yet, I now find myself warming up to this space, a space that seems suitable for drawing lines from what I’m learning in the classroom (and in my travels) back to life in general, a space for making connections between experiences, reading, conversations, and faith.  And that task simply feels worth doing, at least for now, in this moment…

My favorite part of my new place

But Enough about That:

The past week or so has been filled with the unexpected, in ways both wonderful and woeful (ok, so maybe “woeful” is a slight exaggeration).  Undoubtedly the funniest moment that falls to the first category was when a friend and I went to grab Lebanese food at a local joint and came out with lessons in the art of belly-dancing from the restaurant owner himself!  We have since decided to form Candler’s first ever belly-dancing troupe as a way of staying flexible and maybe even financing our textbooks purchases (I'm joking, well mostly).  Other moments this week that I loved include checking out the nation’s second-largest independent book festival with new friends, spending my first evening at my family’s home since moving to Decatur and cooking with my sister (and by “cooking” I more mean watching her cook and of course eating); annnnnnnnd, drumroll please, finding out that I got into the Health as Social Justice course I so badly wanted over at the Public School of Health…and subsequently happily dancing around the apartment for a good five minutes!  The most frustrating example of the latter category was discovering that my email account had somehow been compromised (whatever that means) and as a result receiving over 500 truly nasty emails from complete strangers, replete with expletives and threats—I definitely went through a few days of just closing my eyes whenever I opened my email account, which, yes, might have been slightly counterproductive, but thank goodness, that issue has now been more or less resolved.  I also didn’t so much love having class on Friday evening and Saturday morning this weekend (the class itself I actually did love—it was the waking up at 7:00 am on a Saturday that I resented); and losing my car on Friday night after class the first time I parked on campus and wandering around in the parking deck for about 35 minutes before realizing I was in the wrong parking deck wasn’t so fun either.  The cumulative result of all of these moments?  Well, all in all, a pretty great week, albeit more than a little exhausting!

Food for Thought (and by that I mean for me; definitely not telling you what to think, reader-friends):

Meet Oatmeal, my kind-of cat! (ie, actually my roommate's)

Early this week, my site supervisor and Contextual Education teacher asked our class what steps we as individuals are ready and able to take in order to better welcome the stranger/ the Other into our hearts and lives. (Side note: our contextual education class is a 90 minute reflection period designed specifically around each of our site placements.  My placement is with Lutheran Refugee Services teaching a computer literacy class, but more on that next time!)  This question was really a hard one for me, as the concept of hospitality is one that I recently spent a lot of time exploring in more abstract terms for research but yet is something I often forget to think about in terms of what it looks like lived out in my own life.  Two things I arrived at: first, that I really and truly do need to get better at slowing down and resting, at making room for “interruptions” in my life till I can learn to see these moments as opportunities for learning, friendship, and growth instead.  Second, that I have simply got to start being more informed about the world around me.  After all, here I am, friends with refugees, reading about refugees, writing about refugees, and yet often failing to actively seek a deeper understanding of the forces that bring these friends here!  Eeeeep, definitely convicting!  So, I just might have found yet another reason for keeping up with this blog—to those of you family and close friends willing to wade through this whole post (I promise I’m going to work on conciseness, that is, one of these days), well, I hope you’ll call me out on this.  Or, rather, I pray you’ll help to call me into living more faithfully in these areas of my life! 


But for now, I’m off to enjoy a lazy, sunny Sabbath afternoon of Piedmont Park wandering and then having a cooking/ movie night with a friend— for the record, we’re making cornbread, and kale, and greens, oh my! 

Thanks for reading,

Janelle