"Oh say can you see" - some BIG news from us.

In short: home in July - off again in August

Hi all who still read despite how infrequently we post.

Well this week some big news broke for our family (no, not the baby yet). I have been accepted into the Wheaton College Graduate School to study a PhD in Biblical and Theological Studies beginning this Fall (September). Suffer me to give you a brief story of how this came about.

Several posts ago I wrote about how I had undergone a 'revolution in my thinking' and was considering doing doctoral studies in theology at the conclusion of my masters. At that stage I was planning to apply for several schools including Wheaton College in Illinois and Fuller.

However, during what I can only describe as a playful interaction in prayer oneday I felt the Holy Spirit dare me to apply only to Wheaton. At the beginning, I wasn't willing to respond to this, feeling that I needed to at least give the PhD thing a reasonable chance by applying broadly. But in the end I decided that I was good for the challenge. After all, if I got into the PhD I wanted to be sure that it was God and not just my own willfulness. So in December, I mailed off my one and only application - to Wheaton College and then tried to forget about it and see what God would do. As I mentioned in my earlier post, Wheaton offer six positions only every year. These positions are fully funded and also include a small stipend for (some) living expenses. Roughly sixty people apply each year.

It was a long wait during which Ange and I came to be very settled and surrendered about our future. If I was offered Wheaton, I'd accept and we'd move to Illinois. If not, we'd return home for good at the conclusion of my masters in June and seek God's will in Melbourne.

On the last day of January I got an email from Wheaton calling me in for an interview. They were interviewing 15.

Well the trip to Wheaton was quite something. It is a lovely town and the college campus is simply stunning. The average daytime temperature while I was there was about -10 Celsius. At night it was much colder. Since December we had both sensed deep down that this was just going to happen, and getting called for the interview only served to confirm that, so I did plenty of research while I was there visiting a church, a primary school (yes - Judah just turned four. school next year - scary) two kindergartens and a real estate agent. In the interview itself I was confident to the point of being reckless and was quite jovial with the panel of 7 senior professors. I simply figured that if it was God's will for me to get in, the panel would hear what they needed to hear despite me, and if it wasn't, then, well, at least I got to see Chicago :)

Well I wish now that I hadn't told you the ending because I have no way of communicating how tense this process has been (at times) for me. Despite the underlying hunch that we would end up at Wheaton and the certainty that God was leading us, not knowing for sure one way or the other was killing me (Ange as always was more settled) and since we'd been tossing this round since late september I was just busting to know one way or the other.

I returned from Wheaton on wednesday of last week. The following monday I got a courtesy call to let me know I was in.

So have I finally shut the door on returning to some sort of Church based ministry? Absolutely not. I just figured that last time Church ministry found me I was minding my own business and getting on with what God had put in front of me so nothing's really changed. My passion remains to build His kingdom by serving His Church. I'm not really fussed what the outworking of that is, because now more than ever I'm convinced that God is ordering my steps and all I have to do is, well, keep walking.

Our plans:

I will graduate from Fuller on the 14th of June. We will give ourselves a couple of weeks to pack up and sell up here, and plan to be back in Melbourne by the beginning of July. We will have about 8 weeks to spend heaps of time with our families (we will have a new baby to introduce and the boys will have a cousin on each side of the family born during our brief visit), catch up with as many friends as we possibly can and get fresh visas for our next stint. It is anticipated that the PhD will take 4 years for me to complete under normal circumstances.

We are relieved to finally know what lies in the immediate future (this emotion would have been the same either way actually. We are grateful for God's continued clear leadership in our lives and his provision for our needs. And we are excited about this next season of our lives.

Much love to all.
Clayton