Ordination Exams, Check!

Praise God, Praise God! I am finally able to say that I have passed all my Ordination exams! Hurray! Miracles never cease!

I received a message from the local office where I took my exams, saying that I passed all three of them. However, strangely enough, I have yet to receive the official email that is directly addressed to me. If I don't get it tonight then I will email them tomorrow about that. It's possible that a mass email like this doesn't actually arrive immediately. I can't remember when the results arrived in my mailbox last time. I thought they came earlier in the afternoon, and that was when I lived in the central time zone. Oh well. We shall see. Maybe the office was supposed to forward the email to me that they got. I will find out soon.

I am so relieved - the last few weeks when I go to sleep at night or wake up and think about these tests I would have to pray to God for help. I would repeatedly tell myself that I had to lay all my anxieties on Him so I could go to sleep. I would repeatedly, silently, in the dark of my bed, ask Him to hear my prayer for a passing grade or to release me from this walk that I am on. I had this going on in my heart when I was preparing to preach the sermon on Moses' conversation with God over having to continue their walk through the wilderness to the Promised Land. He said, "Prove to me that we are under your favor and that you will be with us on this journey, or we aren't going another step." (that's paraphrased, of course - Exodus 33-ish) So, this walk I am on, a walk that we are all on in our own unique ways, in persevering our difficulties, calls us into closer relationship to Him, so that we are free to cry, beg, plead, rejoice, as if God is our very best friend, sojourner in the darkest and wildest times of life. I find it so often in my darkest and wildest journeys that while I am persevering to survive or succeed, I often must make time to talk to God about them, or I will forget His presence. The forgetting is just my own inattention to the greater, more important times in my life. We can so easily get so hooked into survival mode, that we might think we are all alone, when in fact, it's just like Jesus says to the man when walking on the beach - He carries us.

Well, more to come, I pray. Thanks for your prayers. - A