Second Week Finished!!

Now that the second week of classes is over, I pretty much have a good grasp of how everything is going. I am slowly making progress through each of my classes, and as mentioned last week, have a pretty good set schedule for myself. This week was pretty calm, and like usual I had to do a bunch of reading and spend many hours studying Greek. I will say that studying Greek has been very fun, and now that I can translate some small sentences, I can see how useful this skill can be in really digging deeper into the bible. Up til now I have learned around 72 Greek words which apparently make up ~50% of the words in the New Testament. We also learned basic grammar for nouns/pronouns, and just learned prepositions yesterday.

One thing I did not expect from graduate school was the amount of self-teaching that I would have to do. Most of the time us students are reading the material and teaching ourselves, and then some of the information would be reinforced during class. We would be expected to know most of the reading/study materials, but not have it reviewed or learned in our classes. This was new to me, but not too difficult. The class I have to read the most in is Systematic Theology. Right now my professor is trying to give us a view into different races and their feelings with how the church is going. This goes into different struggles and difficulties that multi-ethnic churches have faced with things like a dominant white culture in the christian community.

Besides just classes, community building and my spiritual formation has been improving; I am constantly challenged by my friends and professors.Tonight me and a few other brothers will be starting our very first soul care group which is basically a group where we can pray for and support each other beyond just academics. I also thought it would be fun to join the choir (something I have never done before), which meets today for the first time, so I am excited to see how that will go. I have also been attempting each night to attend a group prayer/worship time at 7PM, and on Thursday I was finally able to make it. That was one of the most spiritually uplifting times that I have had during my time here. I always liked singing or listening to worship, but ever since I have been here, I haven't experienced too much of it. That night was truly refreshing and through one of the songs, God spoke to me in telling me that I was welcome here! I have also recently been awoken by how blessed I truly am to have the opportunity to be here at this seminary. If it were not for the prayers and financial support of everyone back at home I would not be here right now. My school had finally posted up all the financial costs for the semester, and just looking at it, I realized how blessed I was that I had people willing to support me through it; so THANK YOU!


On a side note, I had Jamaican food yesterday which for me is something rare whenever I try new food!