There is such a thing as the fall!

Living in a place with an abundance of deciduous tress, Andrew and I are going to get to enjoy a real and true fall season! As the cold begins to come, we get a time of transition and preparation. I remember during Halloween in Albuquerque, diving into the large piles of leaves in people's yards and dragging my feet through the gutters to kick clumps of leaves every which way and make a terrible racket of crunching and scraping. It's coming here in Illinois! Yay!

I am getting a time of transition and preparation before I start my new job. One thing that I am getting to take part in is a Preaching for Partners class, taught by one of the professors at Trinity. The class is designed to give wives a taste of what their husband will be doing in their preaching class, and also equip them to be able to structure and expositional talk should they be asked to give one for the women in their church. The professor is going through the whole process with us, and having us give a talk/sermon to our class. Since I have an abundance of time to prepare, I volunteered to go on October 10th. Already, I have been challenged by the theology of preaching. That we ask men to expound the word of God with a view towards it's application for the church today is really interesting. I told Andrew that there is a distinct difference between studying a passage and telling people "this is what I think it means" verses "here's what it means, and what you should do with it." Pretty weighty of a task. I have skimmed some of Andrew's books on the subject, and am learning about the structure that is appropriate and helpful for an auditory presentation, how to illustrate, how to apply, and how to exegete in a way that remains faithful to the text but still generates application and response for the people you are preaching to. I praise God for Grace Bible church, where the preaching is so very faithful to, reverent of, and defined by to the Word of God. After all, that's where the power of preaching lies. I am sure I will blog about the class again, and how the talk goes. I am really excited for it though!

Andrew is learning about various eschatological views, and how they have changed over time often in ways that are tied to the world events, and the overall tone of the times. I confess I still don't have all the categories straight, but I love it when Andrew is interested to learn about and explain to me these theological issues. The stance that pastors have on these things will influence the way that they read and interpret scripture. And those things are a lot more subtle than I thought they were.

Andrew and I are closer to deciding on a church. Andrew meets with the pastor of Grace Presbyterian Church next week. It's certainly a different crowd than we had expected. But we will see what the Lord does!