New background, new beginning

I'm not dead.

Fall was extremely busy. Six sections of English. New roommate. Trying to keep my head above water.

The semester change in December just flew by. Prepping for two new courses. Then another new one. Then that one got killed. Then prepping for yet another. All while visiting Mom and trying to keep my head above water.

New semester and I'm teaching only five sections, but three completely different preps.

Depressed
I spent some time this morning reading about two years of posts on this blog and I saw the same themes coming back over and over:

• Frustration with the church here
• Loneliness for other Christians
• Feelings of being excluded from the warm heart of Christendom

OK—to be fair, there's a lot about the agony of online banking and the way colleges work, but all that is minor. If I would simply write paper checks and keep one step ahead of the game, those two would go away.

The most difficult, and the one that caught me off-guard, was the exit of our pastor in Mansfield and of the last remaining elders from the "old days," thus completing a change-over in the church to something quite different from what we had. My daughter phoned me and said, "Dad, you've just got to leave that place!"

New beginning
I've been doing a lot of reading over the past couple of months and spent a lot of Sunday mornings at a small Episcopal church in Ashland. The welcome there was instant. The worship is well thought through and deeply grounded in Scripture. I feel as if something that was broken in my life is now repaired (or at least on the way there).

To be quite frank, one reason I stopped blogging is that I was bored with myself and my continual complaints. Now I think I have something to say again, and I'm hoping it won't be the stream of negativity.