I’ve spent over 40 days in a "treatment facility" that also housed state and federal inmates that were transitioning back into society because I had a dirty UA for K2. I have been to at least 100 NA meetings. I’ve dealt with a judge, a probation officer, and a drug counselor.

The interesting part behind all of this is that they want to see that you are willing to admit that you are an addict and that you want to change your life. My situation happened because I was caught with 3 ounces of marijuana. I had to learn the right things to say to a judge, a drug counselor, and a probation officer, and to convince them. If i didn’t, I would not have progressed through the program. It was possible that I could have even gone to jail if I didn’t show them that I wanted to be a "productive member of society that didn’t use mind and mood altering substances".

If you are going on probation, are going to participate in drug court, or just want to know what its like, go ahead and ask. I wish I had the information I have now. It would have made things a hell of a lot easier.

Ask away!

I was snitched on and raided… Cops lied about everything I was not read my rights, got the best criminal drug lawyer in my county and still looking like I’ll have to plea.. Felony possession of mushrooms, 2-4 oz of marijuana and possession of a CS under 28gs…… And 40k in cash civilly forfeited… Plea hearing is July 12th…..

I have to disagree with you. As an owner of a small home theater store, I love plasma screens and recommend them regularly. They have amazing color accuracy and black levels. Every customer that has been “persuaded” to buy one over an lcd vs led has loved their new screen.

I have never forgotten that dream and have pondered the meaning of it frequently. As we are in the midst of a focus on Christian Holiness in Chapel, I thought I would share it publicly for the first time and ask if anyone out there had any sense of interpretation of the dream. Please comment.

Jordon Cooper, blogger and publisher of Resonate Journal (a resource for Canadien pastors), is putting together a list the 40 essential books for a Masters of Divinity degree. The idea for this came from some other bloggers brainstorming if one could obtain a better education from the 40 best business books rather than forking over $150,000 for an MBA.

By no means is Cooper disparaging a seminary education. He’s rather proposing a list of the 40 “most essential books that we have read to minister today.” It’s a fun little exercise. He and his colleagues at Resonate have proposed a preliminary list from which readers can choose the 40 best.

Personally, I’m a sucker for “Top 5/10/40/whatever” lists, but as I browse the list, I don’t see 40 books I’m familiar with. And what catches my attention most is that the books that have most impacted me in my one year in pursuit of an MDiv are missing from the list.

I see works by Drs. Snyder and Mulholland, but there are other Asbury faculty whose works I would consider essential seminary reading (that’s my own educational bias). I see Foster’s Celebration of Discipline, a book I could read over and over again. There’s Zimmermann’s Recovering Theological Hermeneutics, a very deep read and one I don’t know if I’d recommend to the armchair theologian. There’s Oden’s systematic theology trilogy. Annie Dillard and Anne Lamott are two authors whose writings I can’t live without, but if I only get 40 books for my theology library I don’t think they’d make the cut.

There are a handful of books that I would have to add to this list, too. No minister should go without reading Vincent Donovan’s Christianity Rediscovered, that continually challenges me to incarnational living. The Art of Reading Scripture hooked me like nobody’s business and has changed the way I read and teach the Bible. McLaren’s New Christian trilogy gave me permission to ask questions outloud that no Christian I knew wanted to hear. I like history and I love stories, and I found Justo Gonzalez’s Story of Christianity a very engaging and enlightening read of church history. Right now I’m working through Practical Theology, a reader edited by Miroslav Volf, that has my full attention. And the most glaring omission of all is the Holy Bible, of all things. Can’t very well bring redemption into our world without that, now can we?

So my question to you, dear Asbury community, is what books have impacted your faith journey, and specifically journey in preparation for ministry the most? What books are essential to your faith? What would make your Top 40 list?

But it’s hard living in the difference between here and there.

Here I am the mom of two active, intelligent teenagers. Here I am the wife of a loving and nurturing husband. Here I am the daughter, grand-daughter, friend, prayer chairman, choir member, Rotary webmaster, cook, laundress and who decides what we have for dinner and have the dogs, cats and horses been fed?

Don’t get me wrong, I love my life. I am happier at this moment than I have ever been. But living in the tension between here, at home and there, on the Wilmore campus at ATS is a daunting exercise. With email and cell phone I can keep up with my family when I am in Wilmore and my classes and friends when I am in Frankfort.

Not long ago, on an early morning drive from Frankfort to Wilmore, God dropped an analogy into my brain. We are all living between here and there.

Here in this reality, we are strangers, “resident aliens” according to Hauerwas and Willimon. We are living in the tension between this world and the world to come. Thinking about that makes it a little easier to be here and to want to be there.

I think the symbolism in this analogy can be unpacked even more. Thoughts?

So it was with a mixture of joy and sadness that she realized that she would walk through her pregnancy far from home, far from the support she had always envisioned having with her first. But those who we had gotten to know in our church walked alongside us, helping us and supporting us in ways that we never could have imagined. So that first Sunday, as we stood out in the lobby of the church, we were physically surrounded by people who had graciously cared for us during nine months of pregnancy, and who were now delighted to graciously care for our son. I watched as he was passed from one set of arms to another–never left alone in his first moments in the church, never knowing the church as anything but a place where warm arms held him, loved him, and eventually and reluctantly passed him on to others.

The Trinity, they say, is the pattern for our unity in the church. But what I saw that day was how–at its best–the church’s unity helps us see a glimmer of the wild love that characterizes the Godhead. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit work in similar ways in our lives–the Spirit reaches out to us before we even acknowledge God, taking us into his arms, introducing us to the person of the Son and passing us into his loving arms–arms through which we can see the shape, strength, and care of the Father’s own arms. The Spirit takes our feeble efforts to worship and pray and places us in the strong arms of the Son, as he takes our worship and offers it perfectly to the Father, placing us alongside the other gifts he carries in his arms and lays at his Father’s feet.

We are all, whether we realize it or not, being held in the arms of God–passed from the arms of person to person, invited to share in the life of love that characterizes God’s own life. And invited, through the power of the Spirit, to allow that love to characterize the way we do life with each other (what does that mean for the way we do church?), the way we work at forming a community of learning students in Seminary (what does it mean to have a “community” when people are physically separated from each other?), the way I hold the newborn daughter of the guy who sits next to us at church (what are my responsibilities to this child?). God’s love is both the beginning of our life with him and the impulse which drives our service to him–the arms that embrace us in love compel us to help others see, know, and live in that loving embrace.

Middle age is just the time to start-over again… full-stop.

It has become commonplace, if not almost trite, that some folk will crest the mountain of their lives, and in that rarefied atmosphere see themselves with a new clarity previously unknown and then begin to question their purpose and direction. Whether feeling a need to finally do something “meaningful” (as if nothing they have done has meant anything of value) or a sense of “calling” to do something new, they chuck the baggage of a lifetime over one side of the precipice and take a flying leap off the other at a tangent to the course they had been treading… And land in seminary. Hence my expectation, upon arriving on campus in Wilmore last fall, that ATS would be populated almost exclusively by graying, balding, bifocal wearing, mostly married, and slightly pudgy middle-age students.

Most of my experiences in life have managed to evade even my most conservative expectations, so it was temporary insanity that led me to expect anything in particular about this place.

What I found was a campus largely peopled by kids a generation younger than I who, had I any children might be their contemporaries. There are, of course, more than a few of us old-folks hobbling around, but most are married and live off campus, if not in another town where they currently pastor. As it is, I suspect that I am the oldest guy living in Grice right now, and it feels a bit odd being back in a dorm after decades (that’s a lifetime for you youngins) away from communal living among the cinder blocks. The transition would be easier if the tag group, that place where the first and often most durable seminary social networks are established, in which I was placed was composed of people who weren’t all living off campus, except for me. I suppose I could insinuate myself into one or another of the many happy social groupings that abound here, but I do not like to step in where I have not been invited.

The point of this isn’t to whine about not having much of a social life, but rather to point out that the awkward social situation is one of a number of things that makes for a fairly wrenching mid-life adjustment when everything is dropped to attend seminary. Although the “mid-life seminarian” has become stereotypical in our culture, the experience of being called to ministry in mid-life is hardly one that can be cheapened or generalized. It is difficult, anxiety inducing, lonely, yet liberating, stimulating, challenging and fulfilling. I cannot think of anything else I would rather be doing right now. Maybe more importantly, I am growing spiritually at a rate that I had not believed possible. I feel the hand of God on me as I go about this sacred task of preparation for ministry. I pray that all who attend here may come to feel this way.

For a few essays at least, I feel called to reflect on this change-at-mid-life experience here in Wilmore. Those who have been this far up the hill with me will maybe hear echoes of thoughts and feelings they already know. Those younger folk who have recently left college (and who have not yet made such a jarring life-reorientation), might learn something new about their more “seasoned” colleagues.

…And I promise to lighten up a bit … I had a little angst to slug through…

Shalom (and I mean that in its fullest sense)…

Today’s Kingdomtide reading comes from Matthew 10:16-31. Jesus sends out his disciples and tells them to “be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.” He spells out a full reality of life in God’s kingdom, including the understanding that pain and suffering may come as a result of the decision to faithfully follow Jesus.

I’m not sure I know that kind of pain. Don’t get me wrong – the steps necessary to come to seminary have produced some personal struggles. Bye bye steady paycheck. So long employer-paid health insurance. Adios, normal life. Or at least what I thought of as normal.

But pain? Okay, there has been some. But I’ve not been “dragged before governors and kings” because of my stand. Unlike other parts in the world I have a freedom to follow Jesus, including the seemingly nonsensical decision to leave corporate America, uproot a family of five from the safe confines of the ‘burbs, move to Kentucky and live in Christian community. No danger of persecution or prosecution for these actions.

Maybe this is why I have such a hard time connecting with the kind of radical sacrifice discussed in the Gospels and demonstrated in the life of Christ. Most of my connection to Jesus has been through belief statements. It has cost me little and shaped me even less.

Which brings me back to the question I raised at the beginning. Would I still follow Jesus if it was discovered that he was not raised again? Well, it would certainly call many of the suppositions around which I have formed my faith into question. The positive aspect of this exercise is that it causes me to ask how compelled I have been by the very life of Jesus – everything that lead up to the cross. Imagine this: God … yeah, that God … was here and lived in loving relationship to other humans. Real, life humans, just like you and me. So moved was he by love that he was willing to sacrifice everything, including that about which he could rightfully boast, for others. How shaped am I by that vision?

We are hoping that these reflections reveal seminary life from the classroom, dorm room, chapel, cafeteria, and hall way, expressing each one’s formation in relationship to God and community. As such, this is intended to be a formative means, and each blogger has covenanted to cultivate an ethic of conversation found in Philippians 2:1-11

1 If therefore there is any encouragement in Christ, if there is any consolation of love, if there is any fellowship of the Spirit, if any affection and compassion, 2 make my joy complete by being of the same mind, maintaining the same love, united in spirit, intent on one purpose. 3 Do nothing from selfishness or empty conceit, but with humility of mind let each of you regard one another as more important than himself; 4 do not merely look out for your own personal interests, but also for the interests of others. 5 Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, 6 who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, 7 but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men. 8 And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. 9 Therefore also God highly exalted Him, and bestowed on Him the name which is above every name, 10 that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of those who are in heaven, and on earth, and under the earth, 11 and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.

While these folks will be our primary bloggers during the semester, everyone is asked to join in the comments. I look forward to this journey,

Shawn