An Introduction

The first blog post is always the hardest. One has to sort out how to start the thing off in an interesting and engaging style, calculated to grasp the casual reader and draw them in, but without promising too much in the way of updates.

Anyway, this blog is here to chronicle my adventure this summer of 2010 as an intern from the Anglican Church of Canada, working with the Anglican Church of Ceylon (which is in Sri Lanka). I'm part of a wonderful and endangered program with the ACC (Anglican Church of Canada - if you think I'm typing that out every time, you've got another think coming!). The program takes Canadian theological students, and places them in overseas countries, so that they can get a taste of how Christianity and Anglicanism are differently expressed throughout the world. This is not a traditional mission project- we work with the established church there, doing whatever they have for us to do, sometimes education, sometimes preaching in the church, sometimes doing parish work. It varies based mostly on where you end up.

I have been assigned to Sri Lanka, which is very exciting. I don't really know much about the country, so I have been frantically researching it since I found out. I'll leave Canada in late April or early May, and stay for three months. That is literally all I know at this moment!

I've been doing an orientation seminar in Toronto with other interns and mission workers from other churches - I will post about that in the days to come. I've also got a semester of school left before I leave, so I'll post about that to keep you, the reader, interested in me until the big show really starts!

If you're wondering about the address for this blog, I've taken it from the poem "Ozymandias", by Percy Bysshe Shelley. The poem is a commentary on the eventual fading away of all human endevours. As I get ready to head to Sri Lanka, I'm using this poem as a reminder that I'm not going to do great works that will immortalize my name, but rather to do the work of God through the Anglican Church. The work I do may be largely anonymous, and I'm ok with that- I'm doing it for the greater glory of God, not the greater glory of Will!


OZYMANDIAS by Percy Bysshe Shelley

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.