It's strange waking up today! In theory my diary is my own, though of course it is God's and who knows what he will put in it!
My first task is to set a Rule of Life for the Sabbatical, so here goes.
1. Get up normal time
2. Begin day with breakfast with Mandy and devotions in the normal way (I know how easy it is to let things slip and become soporific when the diary does not create constraints, so start each day as I mean to go on.)
3. Put something in each day to focus and energise my studies. Today I am going to see my supervisor in Southall.
4. Put something renewing and non-study in each day. I know that I could easily over-tire myself with too much reading and that is not how I learn best anyway. Today a rail journey will do wonders - that is always enjoyable! I will walk to the station and back.
5. Try to take and publish a photo each day
Don't download emails, or else I won't properly relax. I know the value of stepping back from the usual day-to-day things in order to listen to God's still small voice, that is easily drowned by busyness.
6. Set myself a study task for each day. A start: read Stephen Neill's History of Christianity in India this week (about 160 pages a day.)
7. Get to bed early so as not to put the mornings under pressure.
(Prayer is difficult. Prayer is such a corporate thing: private prayer is vital but not being at corporate prayer several days a week is going to be hard. And a diary with study as a focus is not one that inspires prayer. How the to pray?)
8. I need to draw on the prayers of others. That suggest the Psalms turned into prayer. So, in addition to a poem a day, a psalm prayed, not just read, each day. I join with God's people down the centuries, part of the great 'communion of saints'.
My first task is to set a Rule of Life for the Sabbatical, so here goes.
1. Get up normal time
2. Begin day with breakfast with Mandy and devotions in the normal way (I know how easy it is to let things slip and become soporific when the diary does not create constraints, so start each day as I mean to go on.)
3. Put something in each day to focus and energise my studies. Today I am going to see my supervisor in Southall.
4. Put something renewing and non-study in each day. I know that I could easily over-tire myself with too much reading and that is not how I learn best anyway. Today a rail journey will do wonders - that is always enjoyable! I will walk to the station and back.
5. Try to take and publish a photo each day
Don't download emails, or else I won't properly relax. I know the value of stepping back from the usual day-to-day things in order to listen to God's still small voice, that is easily drowned by busyness.
6. Set myself a study task for each day. A start: read Stephen Neill's History of Christianity in India this week (about 160 pages a day.)
7. Get to bed early so as not to put the mornings under pressure.
(Prayer is difficult. Prayer is such a corporate thing: private prayer is vital but not being at corporate prayer several days a week is going to be hard. And a diary with study as a focus is not one that inspires prayer. How the to pray?)
8. I need to draw on the prayers of others. That suggest the Psalms turned into prayer. So, in addition to a poem a day, a psalm prayed, not just read, each day. I join with God's people down the centuries, part of the great 'communion of saints'.
Liverpool Street Station - a reminder that keeping to the engineering rails can lead to a thing of beauty; not a million miles from a Rule for Life.
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