The Tuesday just gone saw the start of my last year of SEITE.

I re-read that line with part relief mixed with a mass of disbelief. I need to ask where the last 2 years have gone, and can’t quite believe that the group of us that were questioning what on earth we had let ourselves in for 2 years ago in a dingy Medway hotel are now only 30 lectures away from ordination. Actually I am supposed to be sorting a placement for next term so I am only 20 lectures away!

Actually it was with some sadness on Sunday sitting in St Mark’s when a realisation came to me that I could be in a series of ‘last of’s’ now, which contrasts with my firsts of yesterday.

I sat and wondered ‘will this be my last September in St Marks?’. Then I started to think of it being my last Christmas there, my last Lent, Easter, summer, last this and last that. Even if I become part time OPM, or NSM OPM (?)it still marks a change and the end of one phase and the start of another.

Of course being the last of something also has the consequence of myself being involved in the first of something in a different capacity!

I love change. I have always loved changed. I can lose interest quickly. I have often wondered if I was a child now whether I would have been labelled ADHD. Sometimes I think I thrive on the challenge of change. But … it also scares me to think of starting again, of building new relationships, developing new ways of working, reaching new people, learning new things. It scares me thinking of handing total control back to God because I don’t know what I am doing.

It scares me, but today I have remembered a commitment I made soon after my 18th birthday – commitment to be follower of Jesus wherever that may take me; and today I acknowledge that I don’t know where that may be but I’m praying for the strength to be able to have the courage to grasp it!