To all six of you who read this regularly (love you, Mom!), I apologize for the recent poverty of posts. Between October 10 and October 30, I preached three Sunday sermons, taught a week-long class on Numbers and Deuteronomy in Wisconsin, and moved.

This past weekend was quite a flurry of activity: I flew back from Minneapolis (after a three-hour drive from Cable, WI) this Friday evening, and then we moved on Saturday morning. Corrie worked hard last week to get us ready to move, and thankfully most of our stuff was in storage and didn’t need to be packed. But now we have the task of unpacking and setting up house again. I now have access to all my books once more; I feel as though I have just had full release after six months of intellectual constipation.

In many respects my recent teaching and preaching opportunities are more important landmarks in the life of the Giffone family than our move. After years of undergraduate and graduate school, training and preparing for ministry, Corrie and I are finally beginning to see some real fruit from our labors.

I can’t really express how satisfying it felt to complete last week’s course. Since sophomore year, I’ve been convinced that God is leading me to teaching ministry. But last Monday at 9am, when I stood up in front of twenty-four freshmen–that was the moment of truth. It was scary, not so much because I was afraid that I would bomb or freeze, but because I was afraid I would hate it. But I loved it. I’ve never felt "in the zone" like that before, so completely sure that I was fulfilling my God-given vocation. The preparation, the class time, the discussions with the students in and outside of class–it was a wonderfully stimulating, encouraging, spiritual and intellectual experience.

These last few weeks vindicated all the work we’ve put in and all the sacrifices Corrie has made to put me through grad school. We still have quite a ways to go: MTh and then DTh at Stellenbosch. (More on that later.) But this is another Ebenezer, a memorial stone at which we say, "Thus far, YHWH has helped us."