Weeks 5 onward: Work, travel, and many adventures

Man, the summer is really running away with me! Apologies to anybody who's still reading (Mom Mom and Dee Dee, looking at you) for the lateness and the skipping of several weeks! Things have been crazy busy, which is equally exhausting and wonderful at the same time.

Since I last posted, we had our event at Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, drove from Tulsa to St. Louis, from St. Louis to Johnson City, Tennessee, and then from there to Cincinnati, where we're looking at our second event at Xavier University this coming week and where I'm writing this from right now. [Correction: Didn't end up posting last weekend. We're in St. Louis now, looking at our second week here at Harris Stowe University!] It's been nonstop, so it was great to have a day to rest today and be rejuvenated for the next couple weeks.

Each event is pretty similar in a lot of the jobs we do, the set up, our individual jobs during the week, tear down, and so on, but each week also has a very different character depending on the group of students who come and the locations we're serving at. Tulsa, for instance, was a smaller group of students, and a lot of them were serving at local schools doing work like painting and improving the outside of buildings, playgrounds, landscaping, etc. One of my favorite moments from that week was the very last night at the end of the very last session - the band finished playing their last song and turned to leave the stage, and the students started chanting "Encore! Encore!" and with the go ahead from our production manager, Austin, they went and played another song. Despite it being a fairly small event, the energy in the room was incredible, and it was just amazing having a night of such excitement filled worship. The band was also great, and played a Hillsong song that I hadn't heard before somehow called Sinking Deep, which is now one of my new favorites. I definitely recommend checking it out, which you can do here. One thing that really stuck with me from that week was the devo that Caleb did for us. He talked about when Jesus healed the ten lepers - nine walked away healed in body. But the one who returned to Jesus and thanked him and worshipped him, was also healed in spirit. What he ended with, was this statement: sometimes we don't need only to be obedient to God. We also need to stop, come to him and praise him for who he is and what he's doing.

The Gateway to the West

The next location we were at was St. Louis, MO. I enjoyed seeing the arch, even if it was from a distance and we didn't get a chance to go up into it. We're going back though, so maybe next time! CIY partners with an organization in St. Louis called Mission St. Louis, which is a little bit different than most of our other events where we don't have one main partner in the city. Mission St. Louis is a cool organization, because their focus is on empowering people to improve their own neighborhoods. We're fortunate to be able to partner with them, so that while our students are volunteers from the outside, they're able to see this community and relationship centered approach to alleviating poverty firsthand this week and learn from this experience, all while serving people mainly by doing work to improve their homes. (If this sounds interesting, check them out here!)

We climbed a waterfall!!!

After St. Louis, we drove to Johnson City, TN, to Milligan College. That weekend, I got to see my family when they drove down for the Fourth of July. We went to a fair of sorts and watched the fireworks together, and I got to see them the next day as well. The team also went on a hike Sunday morning - wilderness church! - along a trail to a waterfall, where we got to swim and climb, which was a fantastic adventure and one of my favorite parts of the summer so far. Our event in TN was one of our largest, and probably also one of my favorites. It was just a great week - the groups were great, Milligan was great, the weather was great - just the overall atmosphere was fantastic. We had our sessions in the chapel, which was beautiful and a great venue for worshipping together and gaining truth each evening. One of the things I liked about this week, also, was all the chances I had to have good conversations with our emcee that week, Caleb (not my fellow intern... a different Caleb). One of my favorite things is always getting to learn about God from the many wonderful people I've met this summer, and this week was full of that, which was awesome. One thing that kind of blew my mind, was something along the lines of: people are sometimes confused, because Christianity is full of paradoxes, like finding strength in weakness or finding life by dying to ourselves. But we only think of these things as paradoxes because we live in an imperfect world, where things are backwards from what God created them to be. So these things actually make sense - just not to us based on the expectations of our society. That's crazy to me to think about, and so cool. There were a lot of other things like that, but I'll have to come back to them in a future post, if I remember what they are. I also developed a slight obsession with the song Touch the Sky - highly recommend. Go listen to it. Here you go.



Snapshot of one project, before...



Am I ready for Pinterest yet?

and after!

Eating Austin's birthday cake... life as a community at its finest

The next week was Cincinnati, which was last week. This was our second week in Cincinnati, and it was similar to the first week - if anything, it just went a lot more smoothly, since we actually knew what we were doing a little bit more. I really do enjoy Cincinnati as a city, and it was great being back somewhere I was already familiar with. Having some level of familiarity with where we were living, where we went to eat (more icecream! more donuts!), and with driving around the city was definitely something I enjoyed about last week. Not to mention that the food at Xavier University is by far the most excellent of any campus we've been on. I also enjoyed getting to spend some time talking with our emcee, Mark Worley, who knew some Spanish - my first Spanish this summer! and told me about some of his trips to Guatemala, which was fascinating for me since that's the sort of work I'd like to eventually do (missions work in Latin America). We also had a lady as our speaker this week, which was awesome, and I enjoyed getting to hear from her at the evening sessions.

And now, we're looking at our second week in St. Louis. It's been a pretty good weekend of prep work and relaxing - we went and saw Ant Man, and had some misadventures trying to go to an outlet mall. Truth be told, I'm still loving the work I'm doing, but I'm also starting to be really tired, and it'll definitely be nice to have a few days off next week in Joplin. It's hard to believe the summer is already almost over - just three more weeks left, then I head home. Pretty crazy.

Anyways though, it's late, so this is all for now. I'll leave you with a short story... This lovely addition is courtesy of Sully, who probably didn't think I'd leave this in here. But here it is!

I just have one dog named Copper. His best friend Todd wasn't allowed to talk to him anymore cause Copper is a hunting dog, and Todd is a fox.  They were destined to be enemies, but they could have been such good friends.  Why did their friendship have to be so impossible?  Why couldn't they be left alone to hangout with one another, being the best of buds for all times?  Todd pondered this from the window, looking outside towards Copper's house.  Sadness welled up inside of him, for he knew that he would never be able to have the friendship with Copper that he had always wanted, and knew was possible.  Poor Todd, he has no friends but the old nameless lady with a garden.  His only acquaintance was a kooky old owl, and two other birds that were total tool bags.  Todd was alone, alone and friendless...