It's a Good Day

After an extraordinarily warm weekend, the last couple of days have been glorious!

I caught TB out on the windowsill in the porch a little bit ago, completely transfixed by birds singing and flitting around.  Sometimes I have a lot of trouble getting him to stay in one place.  When he sees me coming, his desire to get close to me kills a lot of great photographs.  He jumps to the floor and comes to me, rubbing on my legs and feet.  As much as I love the attention, I sometimes sigh quite loudly because he's ruined a perfectly good picture.

We went to see the veterinarian last week to get his nails clipped. He was driving the dog (Leica) crazy and it was time to clip those long nails back a little bit so that at least he wasn't hurting her.  There were also going to be a lot of people here and the last thing I wanted him to do was hurt someone.  However, he zapped me hard while I was trying to pay his bill.  A couple had come in to kennel their two small dogs for the holiday weekend and all of a sudden, there were doors slamming and people moving around quickly and TB's immediate reaction is to run.  He tried scrambling out of my arms and gave me a good scratch down my chest right under my chin.  It looked like a surgical scar.

I've just learned to live with the scratches and allow people to wonder whatever they want to wonder.

Classes have started at Grand Canyon University and this is such a different learning environment than Asbury. I find that the students are a different mix.  While at Asbury, the students were predominantly United Methodist.  I had a lot in common with most of them. Many are working in a UM church around the country, have beliefs that are fairly similar to mine and lean to the left or right of me, but not too far.  There were mild disagreements on things in the classroom environment, but never too great.

GCU is a Christian based learning institution, but it draws from a much wider pool of denominational beliefs. In the United Methodist church, all elders have a degree.  Even those who aren't ordained as elders yet have at least a bachelor's degree and the students I worked with were getting their MDiv to be ordained as full elders.  That isn't the case in many other denominations.  But, the intensity of their passion at GCU is quite high.  It's going to be fascinating for me as I encounter people whose backgrounds are so very different than mine and whose goals aren't necessarily anywhere near my own and who look at things of God through quite a different lens than I do.

There probably aren't going to be a lot of Wesleyans in this mix and that's going to be odd.  Where I was quite safe in quoting Wesley at Asbury, there will be many here who might not even have any idea who he is (students, not professors. I'm already sensing a high level of academic prowess from the professors I'm encountering).

It's exciting.  THIS is why I love change.  I get to experience a wealth of personalities, people, cultures, ideas, and challenges.