Spiritual Autobiography

I did my ministry training at the University of Chicago Divinity School. During our first year, my class of sixteen gathered for a weekly colloquium that was designed to help us explore what we were doing in seminary as we got to know each other.

Part of this process was preparing and presenting what the director of the ministry program called a "spiritual autobiography." To help us think about this type of exercise, we read books like Augustine's Confessions, Dorothy Day's The Long Loneliness, and Anne Lamott's Traveling Mercies.

I really enjoyed working through my spiritual autobiography, thinking about where I had been in my journey of faith and where I thought I was going at the beginning of my divinity school experience.

It occurs to me, as I begin this blog, that I'm doing the same thing once again.

And I think this makes sense. I'm over a year and a half into a new ministry. I'm over two and a half years into marriage. I'm still paying tuition as a doctoral student and trying to reclaim some motivation and sense of purpose for those studies. I'm more and more interested and involved in the emergent church conversation.

It's a good time to take a step back, think about where I've been, and look for the next steps along the way.