Doctor Hiking

I went over to Corsicana today and with the gift card from my son and some of the birthday money I received from others I bought a set of treking poles. They are very light poles and I really like them. I had unknowingly left my cell phone at the house and upon returning I saw that I had missed a call from TBI. It was one of my instructors informing me that the faculty had voted to offer me a chance to participate in their Doctoral program. I will talk to the church about this tonight and with their blessings I will tell the school that I would be honored. It will be a lot of work, and I mean a lot of work. I would like to do my dissertation on the Song of Solomon, which is, in my opinion, the most difficult book of the Bible. This will require me to spend quite a bit of time at TBI both consulting with my advisor and researching in the library there. I figure it will take about 6 hours a week for about a year and a half to finish this dissertation. Their rules require a huge amount of sources to be cited and a minimum of what seems like a billion words. Then it must be professionally printed and bound. What I would take from such an endeavor would be a thorough understanding of the Song of Solomon and a discipline in research and study which few ever attain.

Back to hiking, after checking my messages I sorted through my hiking gear and culled a lot of things which represented a lot of bad ideas. Walking 24 miles in one day will make you re-evaluate your needs. You can get by on a whole lot less than you think. I had a folding stool in there that weighed more than my tent and sleeping pad combined. It made me laugh when I uncovered it. The new hiking poles are reallly light and smaller than my old pair. I looked at hiking boots and tried a pair on for size. They were really comfortable but the true test of a shoe is 9 miles. How they feel after 9 strait miles determines if they are good. The problem with that is that you can't return them after you have walked that far in them. The picture is of me on a hike in Mineralwells, Texas during the fall of the year. It got down to freezing that night for there was frost on our tents that next morning.

We have a meeting tonight at the church of our Mid-week Bible School workers. We will discuss the schedule and who is going to do what. I am preaching tonight from Ezekiel 37 the valley of dry bones. I still let my imagination go wild when I read that text and put myself in that valley as those bones came together. It would have been an awesome sight. I am on facebook now even though I am not complete sure what that is. It is like a blog but different. God bless you.