The end of the journey...or just the beginning?

Cliche title, to be sure. This morning I finished up my final paper for my last quarter of Hebrew -- one year in the language, all done. That's one language down, one to go (Greek in '10). This has been amazing, challenging, maddening, consuming, and more fun than I expected. To go from learning basic vocab using a picture slide show to reading passages from the Hebrew Bible...I gotta say, it is pretty cool. I like even more that my kids have learned some stuff and that I have not gone any more crazy in the process than when I started. I meet this juncture with both joy and saddness; the hebrew professors were AMAZING!!! I love the language -- it is kinda vague, very artistic and poetic and beautiful in construction and very meandering in how they tell the story. Not nearly as concrete as what I hear Greek is, and how our language can be. I am also glad to be done (for now) with verbs, tenses, endings, paradigms, and the nuts and bolts of a dead language that I really didn't grasp that well. The challenge now, which I hear is the hard one, is to keep up my skills; to read something frequently to not lose it all together. So, as I turn in my final paper this week, I intend to celebrate an ending and embrace a beginning.


יְבָרֶכְךָ יְהוָה וְיִשְׁמְרֶֽךָ׃

יָאֵר יְהוָה פָּנָיו אֵלֶיךָ וִֽיחֻנֶּֽךָּ׃

יִשָּׂא יְהוָה פָּנָיו אֵלֶיךָ וְיָשֵׂם לְךָ שָׁלֹֽום׃

Numbers 6:24-26