The soup du jour for our last day of class was Pentecostalism.  Hallelujah!  This was a fun one for me.   We watched a little history of the Azusa Street revival of 1906.  I fully enjoyed it.  I found it to be a really interesting thing to watch a video and hear a lecture on what I consider to be my primary faith expression.  In ways it was liking hearing someone else talk about your family.  It was kind of affirming just to have my experience and tradition being discussed and it gave new language to what has been so common place to me.  It reminds me of when a funny and articulate woman was renting a room at my parents’ house.  She described my Mom as “deep and random.”  Man did she hit the nail on the head.  I always had sort of just considered my Mom to have a penchant for zoning out in thought.  But “deep and random” better encapsulated her delving deep into thoughtfulness and returning with treasures from which we didn’t know the source or context.  And there was that sense of seeing family resemblances too.  Like hey, that’s where I got my nose from and great aunt so and so liked to holler too.  Except the resemblances had to do with diversity, egalitarianism, worship, and gifts of the Spirit.  It also felt something like looking in the mirror after the getting a haircut, it was familiar and unfamiliar all at the same time.  I wanted to yell out in proud affirmation.  Kind of like, “Hey that’s me!  Would you look at that?”  All in all, it was a rather sweet note to end on.  

P.S.  Life has consisted of much more than just classes this past quarter.  I’ll shoot out some updates after finals.