A day in the life

I've had a request for a post about what I'm actually doing out here besides making offbeat observations about things. That seems reasonable.

My duties are fairly broad as an intern. I'm to help out with, and gain experience doing, a whole variety of church functions. Some specifics:

• Lead midweek Bible studies. Not every week, but they'll have me do a good number. Did my first last night, on Judges 8:28 to the end of chapter 9. Seemed to go well. Which is to say, I thought I wrecked the whole thing, but all of my pastor's comments afterward were positive, so let's go with his version.
• Lead worship a few times, beginning this coming Sunday.
  
• Preach, probably four times. Twice in the evening here in Chelmsford; once (if it can be arranged) in the evening at the Bury St. Edmunds congregation, than which a more fantastic English town name would be hard to conceive; and once in the morning here when both pastors are out of town, so I'll basically be the guy for that service, which is not intimidating at all. I believe the sermons will be posted online eventually, and I shall put up links accordingly.
• Shadowing the pastor on visitations as well as various meetings, including meetings of the session (i.e. the elder and pastors) and the presbytery (i.e. all the churches in the denomination). The most remarkable meeting I'll be attending is probably one I already attended two days ago, a meeting between representatives of the England/Wales presbytery and the Irish presbytery to discuss the prospects of uniting the two unaffiliated presbyteries into one denomination. It was a fascinating meeting, about which I will have more to say once I have time to process it a bit and then write.
• Helping with several committee activities and special events. I'm now on the planning committee for the Holiday Bible Club (think VBS) at the church and the "fresher" (i.e. freshman) outreach at the two local universities, even though both of those events will not take place until after I've left. I have also been conscripted, along with a young American woman who will be joining us from Mission to the World beginning next week, to organize parts of the all-church hog roast barbecue on 4 July. Yes, the English are having two Americans organize part of an event on the 4th of July. Yes, they know. Yes, they think it's pretty funny.

Those are the main things I do. A good chunk of my time is spent preparing for one duty or other. Right now I'm taking a break from preparing the prayers etc. for leading worship on Sunday. This time yesterday I was hip-deep in the book of Judges. This time tomorrow I hope to be on to Galatians for my sermon a week from Sunday night.

I'm busy, but still in a fairly pleasant sort of way. We'll see if I can keep that up.

A given day looks roughly like this:

• Get up slightly later than I ought (we're rapidly approaching the point where I can't blame jetlag any more, so I need to get with it on this one)
• Eat a bowl of cereal (yes, they have cereal here, and they count you as having eaten breakfast even if you don't have five sausages and a couple of kippers)
• Go to the pastor's study, which is located right above his garage, just across the back garden.
  
• Work for a while
• Have a sandwich and a cup of reconstituted soup for lunch
• Work for a while more
• Eat dinner with the pastor's family, or whatever subset of the family happens to be present
  
• Go to some sort of meeting or other
• Read a little for fun
• Sleep

Now you know.