It’s funny, I’ve always in my mind marked the end of a year not by December 31st, but by the end of a school year. After all, I’ve spent 16 years of my life in school! This year, the first year since I was 6 that I haven’t been in school, I haven’t had that marker. All the same, as I’m going to be going back this fall, I still feel in my bones that turning as spring has come around the corner.

Calvin and I attended my alma mater’s commencement this past Saturday. It was…well, graduation. I just wanted to go because I like seeing all the professors in their fancy getups. And the floppy hats, I just can’t get over the floppy hats! Okay, I had some friends graduating and that’s why I really went, but anyways…

It got me all excited about starting school again this fall. I’m just chomping at the bit to get back into education. While I think this year has been good for Calvin and I, and certainly practical from a financial perspective, I am anxious to get back on track for what I actually want to do with my life. I mean, selling boots and socks online can be fun and all, but it’s really rather pointless! I’d much rather be translating Hebrew and studying the Hebrew Bible. And if (and this is a big if) we can scrape up the money, I might cross-register a class at Harvard Divinity School! I already have my eye on one - Myth and Myth-Making in the Biblical and Ancient Near Eastern World. I think I’ve died of happiness!! And I’m going to take Aramaic and, and, Ugaritic too! (At Gordon-Conwell.) And I might have the opportunity to take an archaeological travel seminar to Israel! That is, of course, assuming that I can afford to take time off of work during the summer, and also assuming (and maybe this is the bigger if) I can manage to not be such a wussy city-girl.

Unfortunatly, most people I know think I’ve gone off the deep end…so I try to limit my discussion of such things to “I’m going to seminary and I’m going to teach” which is perfectly true. But I don’t know how many people understand just how much it excites me that I’m going to learn more about these things…and then when I try to explain how learning about these things is going to help me teach people in the church, they really think I’ve gone off the deep end. I just…I just have a passion for taking the ivory towers down off of their pedestals and making them accessible to the average person. Why should the average person only have access to Christian slop? Yet many people who write non-slop don’t seem to care to make it understandable to the average person. Don’t seem to care to want to take these ancient things and take them and show people how it really matters to their understanding of the Bible. All people hear is droning about things that they think don’t matter. But they do! Joe Sunday School teacher doesn’t have to know Aramaic, or Ugaritic, or even Hebrew (though that would be my ultimate dream), but shouldn’t he have access to materials written by people who do know Hebrew, and who are real scholars? People who want to take scholarship and somehow…somehow…I don’t know what I’m saying. I’m rambling. I have a passion. I have a passion for what some people see as two very different things. Scholarship, ancient near eastern studies…and practial Christian living and Bible study. Yet I don’t think that they have to be so far apart. But that article by Fox got me thinking about all of this. See “faith-based scholars” want to ignore scholarship because of their faith. They want to ignore things that make them uncomfortable. So they can’t be real scholars. But what about people who really are scholars but then want to take what they study and make it available to their faith community for review and consideration? Does that make them not scholars? I don’t know. Somehow the two worlds have to meet, people have to make it meet, so that Joe Christian has more than what is available now.

So I have to go learn more, and get my Ph.D, and learn Ugaritic, and I don’t know what exactly that means right now, but I know that’s what I have to do. I will do my small part. I can’t change the world, in fact, I probably can’t change much of anything, but, I can be faithful to…well, if the passion and path combined is what you would name a “call”, then faithful to my calling. Though I don’t like using words like that, because I really don’t know that that means. I mean God didn’t exactly call me up on the phone. But what else would I do? I think when one says to oneself, “What else could I do with my life and still be faithful to God?” one must realize one is one the right path, at the least, where ever it may lead.

Okay, this is totally way longer than I meant it to be and really went way off subject. I really just meant to say that I went to Davis’s graduation and saw all the nice floppy hats. And just to keep a goal in mind, I spliced myself a nice picture from last year’s pictures of graduation (floppy hat courtesy of Dr. Parker’s head, which fit the best onto mine out of all the floppy hats I had pictures of!):