Did I get the job?

Short answer: no. I didn't fail, but rather the whole conversation led me to the conclusion that I don't want to train in Perth. Hooray, a decision is made! And! The other major decision, 'When?' is also pretty much made. I am to begin at the start of 2014. This is less than certain, but it's heading that way. Next step is to inform important people of my decisions.

There were heaps of useful things I got out of the conversation with Rosemary though, other than 'I don't want to stay here.' We had a game of Who Do We Both Know, starting with my parents (who know everybody). We talked about long term plans, trainer/trainee relationships, what is available in Perth, lots of other things which I forget. The thing I hadn't thought of was that I should try to raise support for MTS and keep my savings for if I go to Bible college. There you go.

Coming up: why I don't make decisions with coins!

Feeling nervous

So the email thread has resulted in a meeting, I won't bore you with the ins and outs. It's in half an hour. I'm nervous because I need to go to bed in three hours and worry about how much time I will spend there, and also because I now realise I have nothing to say. I can't think of any questions, and don't really have any intelligent, easily shareable thoughts as far as I can see. There are lots of things I want to say (rant about), but since I have never met Rosemary before, I don't know if I will actually say them. But I'm essentially going to an interview, without a hint of preparation. I did spend a bit of time picking my outfit and worrying about my fringe. I wanted to imply "I'm a cool, modest, frugal uni-student type, who can hide an overly long fringe when required." we shall see how successful I will be. Stay tuned...

Church tourism

I while ago I visited a Catholic church with my friend. Last Sunday I decided to visit a church chosen entirely based on geography: the nearest church to my house. This turned out to be a Uniting church. The only thing I know about the Uniting Church as an organisation is that it is a bit of a conglomeration of a bunch of other denominations: Methodists, Presbyterians and Congregationals according to Wikipedia.

Now, I could spend ages talking about music, robes, demographics, buildings, sermon length, morning tea, welcomedness, or any of a whole raft of things we love to discuss when talking about churches. But really, whether these things are good or bad, they pale into insignificance when placed next to the great failing of this church: they have lost the gospel. In his sermon on Acts 1, the minister failed to mention the promise of the Holy Spirit, the expectation of the spread of the gospel, the historicity of the resurrection, the promise of the return of Christ, or anything else that the passage really mentioned. Instead, he reached the conclusion that heaven (to be fair, it is mentioned three times in the passage) is present on earth, achieved by Christians taking part in social action. He referred to an article in Time magazine to support this. During the service, a young woman stood up and spoke about what the youth of the Uniting Church had decided was important, namely, social justice. She read a statement composed by the delgates at a recent youth leadership conference which listed Aboriginal rights, assistance for immigrants and refugees, and reducing the gap between rich and poor as high priorities (among others which I forget).

Now, I should say that these things are very important, but here they have been placed in the centre, a position rightfully belonging to Jesus. Signing up to causes and raising awareness of social issues has taken the place of boldly proclaiming Christ's death and resurrection, and the forgiveness of sins to those who believe. This pattern continued as I went for coffee with a couple of girls afterwards. One of the girls described the Christian group at her university as a bit crazy, implying that they took evangelism too far at the expense of being sensitive to the needs of those they preached to. Maybe that is true, but the Bible shows that forgiveness is the greatest need anybody has (Matt 9:1-8), so surely it would be preferable to be too bold and cause offence, rather than be over careful and withhold salvation.

As always, it took two days for the good responses to come to me, but at the very least I have been encouraged again to be bold and hold fast to the message of the cross which is the power of God for salvation.

Responses to emails

Are much easier. Why? Because the subject line is already filled in! Tim gets it easy, his subject line is Re:MTS and it comes up automatically. So, yeah, the point of that is that I got a response to my email from last week. He thought it was great that I was considering MTS and thought Perth was definitely a possibility, probably UWA, and instructed me to contact his wife, Rosemary, which I have duly done. I was not fast at this because I kind of expected her to contact me, since she had my email address too. She didn't and eventually it occurred to me that it was probably my job to be the proactive one. So I emailed her, suggesting a face to face meeting, to which she has not yet replied, due to it only being about two minutes ago. I suppose you're thinking to yourself "Why didn't she just copy and paste the emails like she did last time?" Well let me tell you! It's because for some reason my iPad wouldn't let me select more than one word at a time to copy. Yep. I'm that tech savvy. So anyway, here we are, several inappropriately long sentences later, and you know that I have received one email, and sent one email. Stay tuned for more excitement coming your way at some point in the future!

The hardest part of the email to write

Is totally the subject line. You know, the bit where you summarise in five words or less what the email is going to be about. But what if it's just an email saying hi and telling the news. My mum always writes 'From Mum' or 'From Diana' which solves the problem of having to think of things, but seems a little redundant given that her email address includes her name. I often go with 'Hi' or 'Yo' but I think I like the idea of starting a sentence in the subject and then continuing it in the email, a technique mastered by my eldest sister and demonstrated by me in this very blog post. But none of those options really seemed appropriate for this email I just sent off: Hi Tim, This is a bit out of the blue, but I have been thinking for a while about starting an MTS traineeship with an AFES group. I go to Redemption Church in Claremont and currently work full time. I'm originally from over east, near Newcastle, but moved over here for work. Although my default plan is to work in Newcastle where I studied and know people, I want to explore my options a little before I jump in. This leads me to the question: is there a possibility of doing MTS at a Perth uni? I hope to start next year or maybe the year after. Cheers, Heather Sent from my iPad [I can probably stop this pretentious little line from concluding all my emails, but for reasons that I can't explain, I never do] So what goes in the subject line? I've never really met Tim, although we have been in the same room before, and I don't want to give too much away too soon. Anyway, I went with 'MTS' lacking in creativity though it may be.