Words of Encouragement from Another Blogger

I just received a very nice email from someone that read in part as follows:

I am a Presbyterian Pastor of a five church parish in SW Oklahoma. I've been at this for 26 years now. I love what you are doing to teach the Bible and how faith and life are really one word. I read many of the Blogs of your students about how they would change the world. Tell them Keep on! Because with energy enthusiam imagination and LOVE they really can...each one of them.

That was very nice, and I'll show it to my students. Thus far, towards the end of the semester, I feel that more of my students are on board with this improve the world blog project. I think this is in part because I share with them things that I am personally doing to improve the world, such as voter registration, and more recently walking to work and writing a book about Jesus' message of tolerance. So I think that now some of them better understand my intent with the project. We'll see, and I'll be anxious to read their final evaluations at the semester's end.

Re: the letter I received, the person who wrote it has a blog as well. I found their posts to be inspirational. It reminded me that I could never emotionally cope with being a priest or a pastor. They have to deal with the roller coaster of life, such as getting people through the grief involved with loss. The joyous parts of life I could deal with, such as weddings and child birth. Sometimes it is much easier to deal with my specialty, the ancient Near East, because it happened such a long time ago in a far away place.