Hey everyone.  2012 is well and truly underway and so it brings a brand new era in our family life.  It has now been 2 months since we finished at Holy Trinity Doncaster so I thought I should update you on what's been happening since then and what's in-store for the next little while.

After finishing up at HTD we headed down for a week away on Phillip Island with Ellisa's family.  This was nice and relaxing.  On Christmas day we narrowly avoided dying in the Melbourne Christmas Day hail storm and after the weather cleared up flew down to Hobart.  We spent around 3 weeks back there mostly relaxing, but I also had the chance to preach on New Years Day at my old/home church Wellspring and speak on their junior youth camp.  The youth camp was really excellent with a few of the youth making decisions for Christ or reaffirming their commitment to him.  I'm so thankful to God for the work he is doing down there.  It was also encouraging to see youth who had been in a discipleship group I led back there stepping up now into significant roles of leadership (directing camps and assisting as senior leaders).  In that way that God knows how to do things, it was a great encouragement to me at just the right time.

After Tassie, we came back to Melbourne and had a hectic week sorting things out and hanging out with visitors before Ellisa began her fulltime teaching job and I started learning Hebrew at the Ridley Melbourne Biblical Hebrew intensive.  That was three weeks ago, and today I am three days away from sitting the exam and having my head around enough Hebrew to get somewhat involved in a commentaries discussion of some debate over the translation of a Hebrew word.  I've really enjoyed the intensive as it was taught in a more 'natural' language learning style than Greek was.  In Hebrew we have been doing lots of listening and watching and speaking and then filling in the gaps and grammar later.  This has made Hebrew almost seem easy (for a language)!

Which brings me to first semester at Ridley.  This semester apart from Hebrew which is just about done I'll be doing four subjects.  My first theology subject (Doctrine of God and Work of Christ), Church Planting, Christian Worship (how we do church i think) and, Paul and Corinthian Christianity (exegesis subject).  In addition to these I'm also doing an internal subject called Anglican Identity which will help as I continue to explore and discern the possibility of journeying towards Anglican ordained ministry.

I'm yet to figure out what this means for the blog or what I should do with the title (Youth Ministry and Me) seeing as I'm currently not in Youth Ministry.  But when I do blog my feeling is they will take on a more theological reflective sort of nature.

If you pray for us, then the main thing would be that Ellisa and I find a church community to call home.  We've been searching pretty intently in the month or so that we've been back and we are close to making a decision, so prayer for the right church that we can contribute to and that will equip and encourage us.  It's a nice feeling to pick what church to go to, but also hard to be homeless!