On First Days and Winter Nights

Second semester is upon us my friends, well, upon me anyway. Fairly shortly I expect it to start applying its weight. Additionally, Milwaukee winter has finally shown up and it appears to be making up for lost time. Average high this week has been 23 while the average low is somewhere around 8. Our old fashioned radiators are working overtime to keep our apartment at some level of comfort, which results in loud hissing and clanking noises. The other night, when my wife was away at work and I was sleeping alone, I awoke in the middle of the night to the ominous sounds of breathing at the foot of my bed. Faced with the prospect that someone was in my room, I literally felt my body go cold, which is quite a fete considering how cold I was already. I had the same feeling today in my first class - Advanced Hellenistic Greek - when the prof handed out a page from some obscure Greek document, printed in all capital letters, which looked something like this:

ΑΤΕΝΙΣΑΣ ΔΕ Ο ΠΑΥΛΟΣ ΤΩ ΣΥΝΕΔΡΙΩ ΕΙΠΕΝ

and told us that we were going to site read: "Mr. Lashier, would you like to start?" Have I mentioned that I have not studied Greek in over two years and that I never learned the capital letters of Greek in the first place? I quickly shot the girl sitting next to me a look that was somewhere in between hatred and panic. After all, she was the one who convinced me to take the class, assuring me that we wouldn't really get into the material for two weeks (she had the same prof last semester), which would allow me plenty of time to retrieve the Greek that I'm sure is somewhere in the cobwebs of my brain. No such luck. But in the words of Judy Garland, I muddled through somehow, or at least I have convinced myself I did, in the same way that I have convinced myself that it was the radiator emitting the wretched hissing sounds the other night and not, in fact, a monster waiting to pounce. Perhaps both are monsters and I'm living on borrowed time, as they say (whoever 'they' are).

In addition to the aforementioned classes, I am also taking French and Apostolic Fathers, which will be the study of the origins of Christianity, what the earliest theologies were like based on the writings directly preceding and following the New Testament. Pardon my French, but I do think I will be a little les miserables than I was last semester. At the start of the second semester, I do not have the overwhelmingly anxious feelings I had at the start of last. I do not sweat profusely at the beginning of each class (the weather is helping with that). I do not have the persistent feeling that I have fooled everyone and that any moment now, they all are going to realize that in fact I do not belong here. This is progress.

I am excited at the prospect of being more wholistic this semester. What I mean by this is a better incorporation of my spiritual life into my studies. Last semester, I felt that the two were very disjointed, and often the intellectual growth would thrive but the spiritual life would be stagnant. This should not be. In all my learning, I don't want to miss God. Please pray for me to that end.