On the Verge

The text in the picture may be a little hard to read, but right under the heading "Coursework" it says "You submitted your assignment at 11:05pm, Wednesday, June 30, 2010."

At 11:06pm, I was doing a little dance, but I'll let your mind form that image as there were no pictures of the dance itself.

The reason for my joyous celebration is that the assignment is my last big thing to complete for the school year. I'm on the verge of being complete with class work until September. On the verge, but not quite done. Yes, this paper represents the last big task, but I do still have one posting left to do. The final responsive posting to the final reading assignment for my class is still pending. I have the reading done, but the leading post for my group has not been submitted yet. It will come around at some point today (actually I should look to see if its been posted in the last hour...give me a sec...nope, not yet). Once its up, I need to formulate my response to it and post it up and at that point...I will be complete.

Its been quite the school year. In a lot of ways it has been very good. I've learned a lot this year and I've had many good experiences. On the other hand, the year has been difficult and I struggled with a lot of stuff...pressure, stress, lack of sleep. Many things contributed to me having a bit of a breakdown last January. However, sometimes we have to consider those problems as water under the bridge and just move on from them.

That is my plan for today. At some point today (or possibly this evening) I will hit "post" and then its truly going to be celebration time. I'll be celebrating things on several levels, which I will outline:

1. The end of a class-every class that I complete brings me one step closer to ordination, which is of course, the goal of this whole seminary journey. This has been a good class, one that I have enjoyed, but it has been quite a bit of work over the course of the last month.

2. The end of a school year-This marks the end of my second school year since beginning back in the fall of 2008. Both years have presented their own challenges as well as creating their own rewards. A year ago I finished for the summer a little bit earlier. The final task that time was a conference call with one of my professors and two of my classmates that involved a discussion regarding classwork/readings. It occurred about the middle of June last year, so this year I am a couple weeks farther along, however that merely reflects the different structure of this particular class. Either way, I'm looking at about a month and half off before starting classes again this fall.

3. The end of my Junior classification. Once this class is graded, I will have earned 10 credits towards graduation. This is the cut-off between Junior/Middler. In laymen's terms, a Junior is a first year student, and a Middler is a second year student. However, being half time, it would make sense that it took me two years to get to this point. I consider this a bit of a milestone in my seminary journey and one that I'm pretty excited about.

So in retrospect, I've got several things to celebrate as this class comes to a close.

I just checked the postings again...still waiting...Blast...