A Brief Personal Update

I had a request from a friend via e-mail that brief periodic updates about what is going on in my life be posted on my blog so friends with whom regular communication is difficult can stay in touch. That sounds fair, so here goes (for those who care to read it):

With the departure of our curate last week for the Roman Catholic Church we are now a bit short staffed with clergy at the cathedral. As a result I, a humble licensed lay preacher and postulant, am stepping up my participation in the preaching rota a bit. I will deliver homilies on Monday of Holy Week and on Good Friday, then preach again on the second Sunday of Easter. May God give me clarity of thought and expression to proclaim His Word.

We have six weeks to go in our Spring semester at St. Vincent's School and things are moving along nicely. I enjoy the classes that I am teaching, my students are (by and large) engaged and interesting to talk to, and am finding leading school chapel twice per week to be very rewarding. In late May I will accompany our 8th graders on their big four day trip to Washington, D.C. That should be a lot of fun. I haven't been there in almost twenty years.

Next year I will be the full-time History teacher in our middle and upper schools at St. Vincent's, as well as the school's lay chaplain and Religion teacher. Our plans for adding our first year of high school at SVCS are moving along nicely and I believe we already have seven 9th graders signed up. I am very pleased to see this growth, though unless more funding comes in quickly the second floor of our upper school building may not be completed by the time school starts in the Fall. Any generous donors reading this out there?

I begin my Clinical Pastoral Education at Baylor Health Care Systems during the first week of June and it will run all summer. It sounds daunting, but I am looking forward to CPE as an important learning experience. Then in the Fall I will serve as a ministry intern at St. Laurence Church in Grapevine as I continue to read in preparation for our diocesan canonical exams (which I hope to take in January, if it pleases God and the COM). St. Laurence is a fine parish where I have taught an adult Christian education class before, and Fr Crary and his curates are all priests from whom I can learn a great deal.

All in all, things are going well for me. My mother is recovering nicely from her recent cancer surgery and my father is also faring well. Thanks for all of your prayers on their behalf. Well, that ought to do it for an update. God bless you all.