Goodbye, Moody

Some of you are fully aware of what’s hap­pened over the last few days and some of you aren’t. The dif­fi­cult thing about hav­ing friends from four dif­fer­ent social spheres (Moody, Grace Chris­t­ian Fel­low­ship, Cal­vary Fel­low­ship, and pbu)—plus family—is that it can be very dif­fi­cult to get news like this out to every­one at once. I thought maybe a blog post might be helpful.

What I’m Doing

This semes­ter, I will not be return­ing to Moody Spokane. My orig­i­nal plan was to board a plane some­time today (never bought the ticket, though) and fly to Spokane for the Spring 2012 semes­ter. Instead, I’ll be board­ing a plane some­time in mid-February and vis­it­ing Moody for about a week to say good­bye to friends and gather up the last of my things I’ve left in Spokane (like my $500 desk­top com­puter unless some­one wants to buy it so I don’t have to pack it).

My new plan from there is to get a job, do a year or so at com­mu­nity col­lege, and then fin­ish up with a year at pbu.

My Rea­sons

Socially speak­ing, Moody was a fan­tas­tic expe­ri­ence and it forced me to grow a lot. Liv­ing with other peo­ple forced me to learn vol­umes about… we’ll call it patience. I also learned how big a jerk I can be on a fairly reg­u­lar basis. Unfor­tu­nately, I’m find­ing that the social dynamic is almost the only thing Moody has to offer me. There is very lit­tle about the Bible that I can learn at an under­grad level that can­not eas­ily be picked up by read­ing good books (or that I haven’t already learned, frankly).

The other thing is that I recently dis­cov­ered that I could do a year of com­mu­nity col­lege, then a year of pbu and fin­ish up my degree by Spring of 2014. If I stayed at Moody, I’d be grad­u­at­ing in Spring of 2015. Grad­u­at­ing a full year early is, admit­tedly, my main rea­son for stay­ing. That’s par­tially because it’s dif­fi­cult to con­tem­plate finally get­ting an under­grad degree at the age of twenty-five. Addi­tion­ally, I’d like to be able to take sem­i­nary classes and I need a bachelor’s degree to do that.

My last rea­son is that of min­istry. I’m really hop­ing to be able to min­is­ter at my home church out here in Penn­syl­va­nia. Grace Chris­t­ian Fel­low­ship is a won­der­ful church, but I feel like I can be used more out here. I’m cur­rently in the process of dialoging with the elders about where I might plug in best.

Part­ing is Such Sweet Sorrow

To those of you at Moody, I’ll miss ya’ll all. I learned so much from you and wouldn’t give up my expe­ri­ence last semes­ter for any­thing. I plan on skyp­ing, facebook-chatting, or per­haps tweet­ing you guys for a long time to come. Despite what I’m cer­tain have been your best efforts, you’ve not got­ten rid of me entirely.