My dissertation project is shaping up as a retreat geared toward high school students and young adults who desire to think through the basics of Christianity and begin a regular habit of personal Bible study.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
Months ago I put a date on the calendar to motivate myself to make progress on my degree. At first, the retreat was going to be this coming weekend, Friday night to Sunday morning – at a really sweet Baptist camp not far from my church.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
But early in January, as Trudy’s health was undeniably failing, I called the camp and pushed the retreat to their only other available weekend this spring: February 21-23.<\/p>\n\n\n
Which is now just over three weeks away.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
And I don’t have my curriculum in shape, much less all the adult help lined up.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
So last night, a growing anxiety stole several hours of my sleep, leaving only 3 and a half behind.<\/p>\n\n\n
So today was rough.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
I think it might be good to take that as a sign. Maybe I am jumping the gun and need to postpone the retreat until the fall.<\/p>\n\n\n
After all, I have gotten ahead of myself in two crucial areas.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
1) I have not even written my prospectus yet. Or rather, I have written it once and it has been rejected once – for good reason, I can now admit. I have reworked my thinking on the exact nature of my ministry model and my Scriptural undergirding, but I have not resubmitted my prospectus.<\/p>\n\n\n
I have not even begun to rewrite it!<\/p>\n\n\n
And so, on a related note …<\/p>\n\n\n
2) I have not yet finished processing my core ideas for my project. It’s coming along, but not finished. Currently, for example, I am preaching on Paul’s letter to the Colossians – which is my core text for the dissertation. But I am learning so much as I go. And I realize I have more to learn.<\/p>\n\n\n
By the time I processed all my anxiety last night, I found the only “good” reason to not postpone the retreat was out of pride. I didn’t want to look like a failure to my wife, the church, the youth, or the camp.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
But I think I might have found an inspired way to still pull a win out of this. Maybe I will keep the February 21st date and make this into a “Retreat Planning” Retreat. It could be very useful to find out what the teens currently believe, what they already practice, and theological questions they may already be wrestling with.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
Maybe it will be just overnight on Friday night. And I can keep it lowkey and easy and fun – and I don’t have to have all my curriculum ready to go.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
In the meantime, I will get a fall date on the camp calendar and get going on rewriting my prospectus so I can do this in the proper order.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My dissertation project is shaping up as a retreat geared toward high school students and young adults who desire to think through the basics of Christianity and begin a regular habit of personal Bible study.\u00a0 Months ago I put a date on the calendar to motivate myself to make progress on my degree. At first, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10892","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10892","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10892"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10892\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10893,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10892\/revisions\/10893"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10892"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10892"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10892"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}