The First Step

I've been spending some time talking with Lauren (my roommate's sister-in-law, whose boys I look after 3 days a week), when she gets home from work. Anyway, in connection with talking we've hit on some deep topics. And I'm drawn back to a comment that a friend made this last summer. She said to me, "you can't keep putting your life on hold for other people."

Well, I will admit that this has kind of haunted me a bit. However, the last 6 months I really feel as though I have been following God's will for my life, and he has been leading me through some pretty amazing adventures. However, I also feel as though I have lost a little bit of what I had when I started this adventure back in June. Well, really when

I left Fort Wilderness on July 8th. I really felt that I had grown significantly spiritually, and I had felt so much peace over the direction that my life was taking during that time. Even though I was about to fly off to Houston for 7 weeks, and then move to Ohio, I felt I was following the direction that God had laid out for me.

Being in Ohio is definitely different than being back home. And not in a bad way. I am here to help out a friend, but this is also giving me the opportunity to explore myself a little further. I am far away from my family, and while I am somewhat focused on Jenny, since she is why I am here, I've been examining some things about my life.

It's strange, now that I am not at home, not at camp, etc. I've been having to think more about what I want. What do I want to do? Who do I want to be? Where do I want to be 5 years from now? Those sort of questions. And while I still do not have an answer to just about all of them, Something that Lauren said today really triggered a thought. She and her husband, Paco, were going through something similar a few years ago. They didn't quite know what to do, but they decided to just start with something. So they went back to school. They just graduated, and so now they can think about the next step. But this made me think, maybe I'll just have to figure out MY first step.

And in thinking about that, I came back to Capernwray Hall. I heard about Capernwray while I was up at Fort Wilderness this summer. It is a bible school located in Lancashire England, just south of the Lake District. It is housed in an 19th century manor house. It is a Bible school founded by the Torchbearer's association. They have three different time periods that students can come to study, 5 months (september-March), 3 months (April-June) or 9 months (both fall and spring terms).

I loved the place that I was when I left Fort Wilderness, spiritually. I felt very grounded and filled by the bible teaching I had received there. Since coming away, I've slipped away from a great deal of that. And I miss it. So, I think that my first step is I want to go to Capernwray Hall. I don't know which length of stay I want to do. I don't think that I would be able to afford to stay for all 9 months. I would have to have a visa as well. If I stayed for 3-5 I wouldn't need a visa and I would be in-country long enough to feel that I was there for a decent period of time. I'd really love to be there over autumn, so I think that I would want to go for the 5 month stay...
I still don't know how I'd afford it, I'll have to look into a few things. Do you think that people would donate money to help me go? How would you go about raising the funds to do something like this. When I ran the cost through the conversion chart the cost of the winter school (septermber-March) was around $8,000.
Until then, I think I may have a direction...for now.