Basically, this is the timeline:

-April 10th: Jen does her panel interview for her candidacy committee. If approved, she applies to Luther and Trinity.
-August 1st: All final evals from Jon are due in.
-August 15th: Jon’s Internship ends. He might stay on as a pastoral assistant.
-sometime in August: Jon flies out to SoCal and goes through approval
-September: Jen starts school again, either at Trinity or Luther. Jon goes through “the draft”.
-October: Jon (hopefully) gets a call. With a call, he is ordained and either goes to small town in Minnesota (that is within 2 hours of the Cities) to join Jen or Jen and Jon move to new small town in Ohio that is near Trinity.

The thought is this: I’m about 75% leaning toward Luther and 25% leaning toward going back to Trinity. If I get into the M.Div program at Luther, I would start in the Fall and live on campus until Jon could move up. I would be away from Jon and the boys for at least a month and frankly, I’m not looking forward to being away from my menfolk (the cats AND Jon). We’d probably use our free round-trip on Northwest to let me visit or Jon could use it to come and check out congregations. (I would miss my Cat Cat and Pufferpie though…)

If I get into the M.Div program at Trinity, I would have to commute to Columbus daily (i.e Jon would have to take me) but we could probably work around that. Depending on where he gets called, I’d have to move onto campus at some point or I might be able to just commute if we could buy a second car. (*thinking wistful thoughts about financial aid*)

To be continued…