It’s been a while since I have sent out any updates; this is mostly because my life has not been terribly interesting since August. For those of you who I haven’t informed, since the beginning of September, I have been in Vancouver, BC, pursuing a master’s of divinity at Regent College, which is on the campus of University British Columbia. It has been a good, though challenging, experience thus far; however, I realized by the end of last semester that my tendency to go into academic mode meant practically that I lost touch with almost everyone that I didn’t live with. Since this seems the best way to stay in contact with a number of people with a limited amount of time, I thought I’d give it another go. 

Life in Canada has been, for the most part, a great experience so far, although it was definitely an adjustment in little ways. While there is not a substantial cultural difference between Seattle and Vancouver, there are of course any number of small daily adjustments: saying “washroom” instead of bathroom, “took” instead of beanie, “serviette” instead of napkin; the addition of “eh” periodically to indicate a congenial desire for the other party to know that they are included in the conversation; ubiquitous recycling and composting; actual bike lanes; the fact that if I hear a language besides English on the bus, it will most likely be Mandarin, not Spanish. And, John Meyer, the flashing lights mean that it is a pedestrian-controlled intersection; those buttons actually do something up here. 

 I live in the Menno Simons Centre– an off-campus student residence sponsored in by the United Mennonite church. It’s quite a place; I live with 12 guys, 12 girls, and a married couple who oversee the whole thing. With the exception of the two other regent students, all of the other student residents are undergraduates at UBC. When I tell people that I have 25 housemates, the usually look at me with an expression somewhere between amazement and confusion. However, it is actually a wonderful living arrangement. The house itself was a former convent before it was bought by the Mennonite Brethren, so we all get our own rooms (even though said rooms are certainly sized for someone who has taken a vow of poverty). Interestingly enough, the main place that I notice the crowd is not the bathroom, as I first expected it would be, but rather, the kitchen; with three or four people trying to assemble dinner in the same place at the same time, dinner time oftentimes resembles a large game of Twister around the stove. Other than that, though, it’s quite roomy, with three floors and large communal living spaces, including a nice piano for the congregation that meets here on Sundays. It’s located about three miles from Regent along the main bus line, so it would be hard to find anything much more convenient. 

Regent itself has been good, for the most part. When I first got there, I was surprised to find out how small it is. The entire school fits in one building–I think something like 13 classrooms in total. Total enrollment is in the neighborhood (or “neighbourhood,” as our friends to the north would say) of 400 or so, so I’m rapidly getting to know faces (although my slowness with names is proving a bit of an impediment). The student body is quite diverse and interesting; by the end of last semester, I had made friends with (for example) a good many Canadians and Americans (of course), several Australians, a man from Singapore, another from Indonesia, a man from Grenada, and a family from Japan. It’s actually a very inspiring experience to talk to a lot of them. My Japanese friend Mitito, for example, is taking three classes (all of them reading and writing-intensive), while also adjusting to life in a completely different country with his wife and two-year-old daughter. When he enrolled, he had been speaking English for about three months. I have no idea how he does it…but then again, this is the same guy who once worked for two weeks on two hours of sleep a night in his job as a financial consultant in Japan, so I guess he’s used to challenges. Professors likewise are a fairly diverse bunch, both denominationally and geographically. Probably the extremes of the spectrum are Rikk Watts (an Australian Pentecostal) and Hans Boersma (a Dutch Reformed Closet Catholic), and everything that could be broadly classified as “evangelical” in between. 

Nonetheless, last semester proved challenging in ways that I hadn’t expected. Last semester I wasin four classes–Greek, Christian History I, Old Testament Foundations, and Christian Thought and Culture. As I have a reasonable degree of familiarity with all of these general subjects, I was not anticipating great difficulty academically. What I had not anticipated was that, in some ways, familiarity with the subject material in some ways felt like a disadvantage. As all of the exams that we write (not “take”) are marked (not “graded”) by TAs, and the vast majority of these are in essay format, I found myself increasingly frustrated by feeling that I was being judged by someone who was less qualified than I felt that I was. By the end of the semester, I had begun to take some passive-aggressive reprisals against those that I saw as my unjust oppressors; being reasonably confident that the TA in charge of grading couldn’t read it, I wrote choice snippets of Pink Floyd’s “Brick in the Wall” in Greek on my Greek exam. Immature? Undoubtedly. Satisfying? Kind of. By the end of the semester, I was pretty jaded with school in general. I wanted to be DOING something, not simply writing papers about people who did something, or engaging in interminable arguments as to whether or not Dispensationalism is a product of Platonic dualism (and if you didn’t know what that means, don’t worry; neither did the TA’s who were evaluating the discussion). 

Reflecting further, though, I realized that perhaps the biggest thing I needed to learn was in the realm of character, not class. I had to face up to some aspects of myself that I’d just as soon ignore. I often value myself by my academic achievements, and have a strong proud streak that smarts sharply at criticism. When I get into conversations about topics that I think I know something about, I have the tendency to pontificate, and not to listen. After a comparatively restful year last year, this has been a good reminder that I’m not done growing yet. 

This new semester is looking like it’s going to be good, but I’ve gone on enough for one night, so I’ll save that for later.