the first days are the hardest days

I apologize to anyone who checks this often, that I have not been posting very often at all. Classes started and work started and soccer kept going and with those three combined, I have felt completely overwhelmed, and like I barely have enough time to sleep, much less post something.

I like all of my classes (Sociology Senior Seminar, The New African Diaspora, African Literature, and Religion in Philadelphia), but they all require 60-100 pages of reading before each class, which I am finding very difficult to keep up with. I don't know if this semester is harder than past semesters in terms of my work load, or if I am just not used to being in Bryn Mawr mode. Maybe both.

Anyway, for my religion in Philadelphia class, one of our assignments was to go to the Haverford Library Quaker Special Collections and Transcribe a piece of writing from early Quaker recordings. So I chose a letter written about a man who had died (Charles Taylor). The librarian brought out this big thick leather bound book from the mid to late 1600's for me to look through. It was pretty amazing to just look at, much less touch, these original writings from 400 years ago. It seemed surreal to me.

This is the passage I transcribed from the swirly fancy writing:

A Short Testimony Concerning Our Dear Friend & Brother – Christopher Taylor—

He was one of the Lord’s Worthies, Strong and steadfast in the faith, very zealous for the truth, very Careful for the Church, a man unknown to the World his Life was hid with God in Christ his Ministry too not in the Wisdom of the flesh, but in the Power of God, It was the seed, the Birth Born from above that could receive him, and was refreshed by him, in a word he was a Jew inward whose praise is not of men but of God and for as much as that he was a man thus qualified I could not well be satisfied that so worth a man as Dear Christopher Taylor should be buried in Oblivion, for though the Name of the wicked shall rot yet the name of the righteous shall be had in Everlasting remembrance; His chiefest joy was to feel Friends in the Invisible Life, and although many Exercises did attend him for the truth’s sake, he was faithful to you. Death, and so has received a Crown of Life, and although his departure from us was our Loss, yet it was his gain, for blessed are the dead, which die in the Lord they rest from their labors and their works do follow them.

William Yardley