Second Term at Mars Hill Graduate School

i haven't talked much about being in seminary/post-modern evangelical graduate/counseling school, ie: Mars Hill. I think it's a little bit like a baby in the womb trying to describe the taste of the sandwhich its mother is eating. There's a lot that I won't really be able to see, taste, or understand until I'm out. But I was reflecting on how completely different my exprieence with the start of my second term is compared to my first. The new downtown campus was delayed all last term, which meant I was spending an hour 1/2 to 2 hours getting to school in suburbia on three different buses, then having to find/beg a ride at the end of every day if I wanted to make it home before 10:00 each night. Not only that, but there was really no space to exist in that building during down time and no way to get food between classes unless I wanted to walk to McDonalds and back (some of you are wondering how a little walk would keep me from McDonalds), but there wasn't enough time between classes to do that.

Second of all, last term was all about navigating a new life in Seattle and what it meant to be back in school after four years.

But the biggest transition was wrapping my head around the Mars Hill everything: looking back at your history, losses you never grieved, stories you hadn't told, the way you've learned to relate to people-in all its disfunction and glory. Needless to say, there was a lot of paradigm shifting and bubble shattering along with a whole lot of new language and vocabulary. Do you know what hermeneutics means? If you've talked to me on the phone lately, you've likely had to ask me cuz I now use the word like I use "like".

So the metaphor (I love 'em and need 'em) I've found to describe my first term at Mars Hill Graduate School is this:

It's like being at the ball crawl at Chuck E. Cheese's. You're totally stoked to be at Chuck E. Cheese and all that it represents: party, birthday, growing up but letting out your crazy side, etc. But you're in the ball crawl, and while you know it's supposed to be great, every move you make causes you to sink further into the pit and every time you laugh, you lose more of your balance untill you're wishing someone would come pull you out but you can't call for help because you think you're supposed to be able to handle the ball crawl.

So second term, at the new, beautiful, adaptive-reuse former luggage factory- east-villagesque Campus building in donwtown seattle, I finally feel like I'm out of the ball crawl and free to roam the arcade games and use my tokens for whatever prize I'm willing to try to win enough tickets for.