Ben and Kristy Blog

One Man’s Christmas, Another Man’s School Day

Today marks Ukrainian Christmas Eve (called the Holy Evening, or the Generous Night). We weren’t sure exactly what our plans would be today, since, according to all the traditional Ukrainian texts we read in our lessons, it is a huge ordeal with a giant meal, consisting of 12 vegetarian dishes, including certain items they only eat at Christmas. Tomorrow (Thursday, Jan. 7) will be a 10am church service, when we will finally start singing Christmas songs this holiday season. (Why we’ve yet to is beyond us, but perhaps something associated with the lack of Advent celebrated here.) Although humbling to have no plans but staying at home on this special holiday, we used it to get started in our 2nd quarter of grad school. Every new class requires a big chunk of time to sit down, get familiar with the material, the expectations, the assignments, and to get to know your online classmates. This quarter is a bit different than last because the 25 members of the class are considered our cohort, and we will be primarily studying with them (at least core classes, but not necessarily electives) for the next 2+ years, quarter by quarter. We will also have 2 two-week on-campus intensives in 2010 and 2011. It’s pretty neat, since there are students from all over the world in the group. Since the master’s degree is global leadership, that is a pretty big pre-req for the class. (Experience in missions, if not full-time at least.) It is clear that God has big plans for us in pursuing this degree.

I actually forgot to write a blog post about the outcome of the Systematic Theology class that we finished on 12/11. We keep praying that God will use these classes to impact our students in Lviv. After studying the theology of the Trinity for weeks (my favorite subject of the entire class), I invited all the girls in our youth group over for a big American dinner, and then we studied the first chapter of Hebrews together. That chapter happens to be entirely about Jesus as God’s diety equal. It was so fun to teach and be able to pad the material with course material from Fuller. Pray for us, that this next class will have an impact as well.