Thoughts and Other Things

One thing that will always fascinate me about God’s Word is how He can speak something new using the same old Scripture. Something that is the same is not known to change, but the wonder of God’s word is that it remains the same, yet He speaks something new and different through it each time we approach to hear Him. I have read the story of Jesus feeding the five thousand countless times before, but when I read it this past weekend, God opened my eyes to something new. My focus has always been on the miracle of the five loaves and two fish being multiplied to be enough for a crowd of over five thousand, but this time He led me to see the miracle of the leftovers. “When they had all had enough to eat, he said to his disciples, ‘Gather the pieces that are left over. Let nothing be wasted.” John 6:12 I always understood the reason behind Jesus’ instruction to collect the leftovers being the one stated - that there be no waste. This time around I understood that it was important for the l...

Today I submitted my Masters dissertation. Three years worth of work squeezed between almost three hundred pages. I can't tell you how pleased I was to finally click 'submit'. It was such a long-awaited moment. From the first year, working tirelessly on a research proposal to the second year where I was manning fieldwork - finding appropriate participants, conducting interviews and collecting data. Then came the time to pull everything apart, analysing the data and then pulling it all together again as I reported on my findings. In the background of all these years, was the constant reading of several books and journal articles so that my findings could be set against other voices on the subject. Compiling each of the five chapters of the disseration proved to be such a process. Not only because of all the two-years of work that preceded it, but because I actually had to write a few drafts of each before I got it right. It has surely been an eye-opening experience to work o...