Okay, so I spent a couple of hours today again preparing for The Da Vinci Code series we're doing on Sunday mornings with the young adults. By the end of it all I was left with still more to do and a growing sense of stress. The material is great - it's something that I think speaks into our lives and is really interesting, at least to me. The problem is that there is just no way we can cover all the bases in a little over an hour each week. Especially this week. We're looking at Gnosticism and the Gnostic Gospels, why certain 'books/gospels' werent' included in our Bibles, etc. I could literally spend the entire time lecturing and dispensing a fair amount of information, but that's not why we're doing this series. I want our time to be engaging, yes, but I want it to be life-altering because we have opened God's Word and poured ourselves into it.

It's a bit strange to be stressed like this, I have to admit - at least when it comes to teaching. I've been doing this long enough and have written enough that most of the time it comes fairly easily. Even when it doesn't come as easy it is still enjoyable to me, because this is one of the areas that I know God has equipped me. The stress doesn't come as much from wondering what I'm going to say. It comes more from the overwhelming sense of responsibility I feel covering this kind of material. It really takes more time researching & preparing than a normal series because you're talking about theology, about history, about the roots, in many ways, of our Christian faith - and I just want to make sure I get it right.  

The good thing is that we've set-up a Da Vinci Code resource email list for this very reason. Now I just have to decide what to talk about & what to relegate to an email to send out next week. I want to talk more about God's Word than some novel, so we're going to talk about things like how the Bible was formed, the timeline of the events surrounding it (which sheds a lot of light on both the process of coming up with the canon of Scripture & the discrepancies of Dan Brown's assertions in the book). We'll overview what Gnosticism is, what the Gnostic gospels are, etc., but I'll probably leave much of the details to the email so we can spend more time looking at God's Word.

BTW - I closed my laptop, threw my swimsuit on and jumped into the pool with the kids for about half an hour. It was just what I needed. Just relaxing, playing for awhile, setting the responsibilities of life aside for a time made all the difference.