Birth of a blog

Does the world really need another blog? Almost certainly not. In fact, I suspect it could do with fewer. But here's a new one, for what it's worth. Let's hope and pray it can be useful to someone.

Here's where my life is at right now. It might help explain why I've chosen to set up this blog.

This year, I have, perhaps a little thoughtlessly, done exactly what I was always told not to do. It's my first year of teaching, and here's the advice we were all given last year - avoid too much change in the one year (a piece of advice given by a graduate who had, in his first year, moved out of home and become married). No, I'm not married, but I did decide to move to be closer to work - only fifteen minutes away from where I was living, but it feels like another world. And no, I'm not one of those sheltered tribal types who feel like life has ended when they move into the house next door. I've moved around quite a bit, and am, I like to think, fairly flexible. But here's why it was a big step.

Before this year, I had been living in the inner suburbs of Melbourne for five years. I had developed something of a community there - as much as you can in the city - helped no end by my involvement in a small Anglican community church in West Hawthorn, where I had managed to make a lot of like-minded friends. But here was the difficult thing. For a while, our pastor had been teaching about "impacting the city" for God, and I found the teaching very challenging and, well, moving. No pun intended, but, on the other hand, pun intended. Reaching a point when I felt distinctly that it was no longer Hawthorn or the inner city that God was wanting me to impact, but the Northern and Western suburbs, I moved. My sense of God's direction for me was confirmed when I got a job at the school that had first given me that sense of calling, a very large government school in the North-Western suburbs (hence the convergence of North and West). I then moved into a share-house in the North, about fifteen minutes from my school, and the more that this became my life, the less relevant that Hawthorn seemed to me. After a huge amount of prayer, I came to the difficult but clear conclusion that I was to move on from my current church.

So here I am. I've moved houses, started a new job, and have been, for the last several months, without a clearly defined church community.

I'm hoping that, if I'm still writing on this blog in a few years, I will find that this strange, transitional phase of my life has developed into a clear sense of God's direction for my life - or maybe it won't, because God, though He gives us all the direction we need, is rarely very talkative about where exactly He is taking us, or why. But here I am, and we'll see where I go next.