Travelling teacher

It's just gone 7pm. Outside the falling rain makes a rhythm almost musical, the sun long since having disappeared for the day. I need milk. Contemplating the 7 minute walk up the road I decide the two minute drive is embarrassingly preferable so I settle here to update my blog. I made lolly cake today. A quadruple batch actually. Next weekend is our international festival of cultures and my role is supplying 100 servings of lolly cake. Yay sugar! It has been quite the process finding equivalent ingredients to replace eskimos and malt biscuits as well as settling for inferior coconut - apparently desiccated  coconut isn't a thing here. My housemates have happily obliged in being experimented on, which has helped me come up with something of some resemblance.  But now I'm just rambling. Update on life here - I've been so busy I've barely noticed I'm missing out on my third summer in a row - thanks guys for all the beach posts! But joking aside, it's been...

The last two weeks of class have had me thinking. A lot. We have a bunch of different classes. We have our main session class, which all of the first year students attend, optional classes we sign up for, optional projects we sign up for, meetings with our RG, a group of about 70, and meetings with our small group (four of us) or core group (20 of us). Then we have homework, sometimes short answer questions, sometimes mini book reports, sometimes self assessments. It is crazy to me, and no coincidence, how even though I am the only person here with my distinct combination of classes and homework experiences, so often the message I'm getting, the 'thing' I'm working on, is consistently addressed throughout. Lately, it's been mindsets. One of the speakers we had last week said something that's stuck with me, "Any area of your life that isn't glistening with hope shows you're believing a lie." Wow. There are a lot of lies I have been believi...

What a year! According to my Google 2018 review I visited 12 countries and 41 cities, travelling the equivalent distance of 1.5 times around the world. Kinda crazy, all things in perspective. It's that time of the year when people reflect on things and with my first day of school for the year tomorrow, I guess a bit of that has rubbed off on me. Many of the best and worst moments of my life have happened in the last year. I have met some incredible people, had some of the greatest victories and the most impressive failures, the deepest feelings, significant moments, craziest adventures, challenging circumstances, I could go on.             So what have I learned from it all? There's a song from one of my favourite bands that says,  "Ashes from the flames  The truth is what remains The truth is what you save From the fire And you fight for what you love  Don't matter if it hurts  You find out what it's worth...

I think I may have already mentioned this, but the school I am at has around 2500-3000 students, I'm not sure of the exact numbers, but it's a lot of people. Somehow, they manage an organised chaos over "Retreat week" where all the students take turns going away on retreat for two nights out of the week at different campgrounds in the surrounding area of Redding. By campgrounds, I mean pretty fancy summer camp locations which are almost their own mini-communities: pools, ponds, waterslides, high ropes, games rooms, a cafe, a shop, bush walks - like I say, pretty fancy! Anyway it was amazing to get out in nature and have a chance to get to know my RG people better. So good! When we first arrived, they had booths set up where you could go and get prophetic words or people would draw prophetic art or do prophetic dances, all kinds of things and run by the second year students. I got one word which had me in tears by the end. The guy, who I'd never met before,...

I recently had a Facebook memory come up on my page from three years ago when my submitted dissertation commemorated the end of 19 years of being a student. I laugh at my 23 year old self thinking I would be quite happy if I never studied anything ever again. So naive! The truth is, I never really thought of Bible college as study, but the reality is starting to set in of what life as a student is. Not that I'm complaining, there are things in this season I'm so grateful for - time to reflect, recharge, no responsibility for anyone but myself, freedom to make friends and have meaningful discussions. Yet also living from savings, watching that bank balance go down and not being allowed to get a job, relying on hourly buses and kind people to give me rides to things as well as the odd Uber, all those little luxuries you get used to as a full time employee that a student life just doesn't have room for! But anyway, a quick recap of my first month here: The smoke is int...

When I told people I was planning on leaving teaching to study at a Bible college, the two main questions I got were, "So what is the qualification for?" and, "What do you plan to do with your studies?" When the answer to the first was, "I don't end up with a qualification" and the second, "Probably go back to teaching", a lot of people were understandably confused. Yet not a single person has tried to talk me out of it or has shown anything but support towards me. I'm not sure if it's because you all know me well enough that I'd be too stubborn to back out and arguing with me would make me all the more determined, but I just want to say it has made me appreciate in a deeper way the people in my life. That they would support a decision I've made, while themselves not understanding why I would choose as I have but trusting me enough to see this is a good thing for me, leaves me with an appreciation beyond words. There are man...

I arrived into San Francisco airport in the early afternoon to a nice, mild, low-twenties temperature, and after spending over an hour on the runway waiting for the plane at our gate to depart, we were able to get off at last. Border patrol, although not as friendly as some, was less scary than I was anticipating (turns out the school I'm at has been working pretty hard together with the airport to make things fairly effortless for us internationals), and I made it through unscathed. Everyone else in the airport was super friendly and helpful, and before long I was sitting in my rental car trying to adjust my brain to driving from the passenger side.  After a few close calls and providing some mild entertainment for onlookers from my epic driving skills, I found a McDonald's I could scab WiFi from to load Google directions and off I went on my merry way. San Francisco, I've decided, is not much fun to drive through, particularly in their five hour long "rush hour...