Dead week...

This week in the Cambridge Easter term is officially known as 'Dead Week' and I have to say at the beginning of the week, it was fairly apt for how I felt - dead. On paper the Easter term looks like it should be a walk in the park: no lectures, maybe a couple of supervisions, but the rest of time is free to finish essays and revise for those four exams that are all over and done within a week. But that is so far from the truth - everyone's stress levels rise, heads are full of looming deadlines and little else matters. And then the students hit this week and everything sudden stops... essays handed, exams written, no reading to be done yesterday... and so we crash, we crash into a week of nothingness.

Now because this is a theological college, a week of nothingness is not really an option. There are things as ordinands we must do which are not covered in the academic syllabus, so we have had other things to do and a couple of seminars we've needed to attend, but there has been time just to pause, to recover and return to life.

Over the week, I have come to realise how lost I had become within this world of looming deadlines over the past six weeks. I'd moved from word to word, book to book, worry to worry, praying that I'd have the strength to finish each essay and write each exams, but that was about it. There was not really a world outside the world in my head... God kind of became more about theory than practice, more about was in my head than what was in my heart. And when I did go to seek a place of peace, to seek a space to be with God in practice, all I found was discordant noise, literally as well as metaphorically.

Now the melody is coming back, that peaceful space with God returns, and another step in learning about ministry has been taken.