GAP Year Update

It's been far too long since my last blog post. I've got nothing earth shattering to , just wanted to give people an update on my GAP year. So here it is. The good, the bad, and the stretching...

First off, the good. God. God is good. All the time. All the time. God is good. I'm very blessed to be serving the Word of Life Community here in Ann Arbor. God has placed some truly talented and holy people in my life this year that I get to live, serve, and have fun with. Sometimes I go to meetings and have to pinch myself that I am actually here talking to the legendary x about catering options for a conference that I'm helping her organize. 

For the most part, I enjoy the service I've been asked to perform this year. Gappers in Ann Arbor divide their time between serving University Christian Outreach (UCO), Ignite Youth Group, the Word of Life Office, and GAP training. The percentage of time each gapper spends with each group depends on their age/state of life. For example, most of my service is with UCO as I'm a post-college student. The other two gappers I serve with work more with the Ignite Youth Group than I do since they just graduated from high school. I enjoy serving a variety of outreaches of the Word of Life Community even if it means that I have to spend an hour at the beginning of each week figuring out my schedule. 

The biggest challenge of my GAP year has been adopting a servant's heart. What does that mean? It means accepting that my schedule is not my own, and not responding in anger when someone asks me to be flexible with my time. It means carrying out my service with a joyful attitude even when I feel less than joyful. It means forgoing romantic relationships, and focusing on building relationships with my Ann Arbor sisters. It means refraining from deriving my self-worth from what I can produce, and instead recognizing my value as a child of God. 

I'm choosing to look at my GAP year as a year set apart, not a year of constant sacrifice. This year will be unlike any other year I experience, and I don't want to ruin it by adopting a woe is me attitude. God is stretching and challenging me out of love because he refuses to settle for the mediocracy I'd attain if left to my own devices. 

I'll close this post with a metaphor. Last night my housemates and I had a movie night where we watched My Big Fat Greek Wedding. I love this movie. The movie's a pretty classic portrayal of the ugly duckling-swan transformation. In the beginning of the movie Tula's waitressing in her family's restaurant when she first lays eyes on Ian. They have the classic awkward encounter. Later in the movie, once Tula goes to school and learns to take better care of herself, they meet again. Ian recognizes her from the restaurant but not for her awkwardness. From then on they fall in love and live happily ever after. 

So what's the link between My Big Fat Greek Wedding and a GAP year? A GAP year is ment to be a transformative year. The person I will be at the end of my GAP year will still be me, but the me who's spent a year seeking the Lord and turning to him for comfort during those lonely and frustrating moments. I'm not going to leave my GAP year a swan, but I'll be one step away from ugly duckling. 

Reflections from a Narcotics-Induced State of Consciousness

It feels so good to be blogging again! Since my last post, I spent three days in the hospital. I'm currently blogging from Pittsburgh. I guess I should start at the beginning...

About a month ago I moved to Ann Arbor and dove head first into my new life. From staff meetings, to office training, to wandering around the Diag hopelessly lost, I was a woman of action. After about a week of this, I woke up in the middle of the night with stomach pains that quickly turned into nausea/vomiting. My roommate thought I had the flu. But I never knew the flu to cause stomach pains without a fever. By the next morning I felt better, so I shrugged the night off as my body's way of adjusting to a new environment.

3 days later I awoke at 6am with the worst stomach pains I've ever experienced. Pain is a very humbling state of being because any pain worth its name suggests that the person in pain has exhausted all means of relieving the pain. I knew I had to go to the hospital. Thankfully I live within a ten minute drive of U of M's hospital and my roommate had a car. After a several hours of pain medication and ultrasounds, the doctor informed me that I had an acorn-sized stone in my galbblader. My galbblader would have to come out within 24 hours.

So here I was an otherwise healthy 22 year old. Laying on a hospital bed 5 hours away from home drifting out of a narcotics-induced state of consciousness. I remember laying in my bed and hearing God say that he wanted to heal me. My first response was great, but couldn't you heal me in a less dramatic manner? I absolutely hate being the center of attention. I know that the speed of news, particularly bad news can travel faster than sound and that people were going to want to talk to and about me. God responded by telling me that me getting sick was not about me. Then I fell asleep. Again.

It was not until a couple days ago that I understood what God said to me. Before I left for Ann Arbor, my mom and I fought about me leaving. She did not understand why I needed to go live 5 hours away and work for free for a year. I tried to explain to her the benefits of living in the community there, but my arguments fell upon deaf ears. When I got sick Mom hopped in the car and drove to Ann Arbor. She was blown away by the kindness every in Ann Arbor extended to a girl they'd known for less than a month. Their care of me during my illness explained community life to them in a way my intellectual arguments failed to do.

I'm going to be heading back to Ann Arbor this weekend. When Mom drops me off this time she'll be able to drive back to Pittsburgh knowing that she can turn off her mom radar for the next little while because there is a whole community of people in Ann Arbor willing to sit in the emergency room with her baby girl.

Slap on a life jacket. Grab a Water Bottle. Climb in. Say a Prayer.

When I was a senior in high school, my sociology teacher spent a week lecturing us on Culture Shock. I clearly remember the way his cheeks turned a faint shade of purple as he proclaimed "you are going to wake up one morning several months from now, after Mommy and Daddy drop you off at your chosen institution of higher education, and experience the phenomenon known as CULTURE SHOCK and what are you going to do? DEAL WITH IT."

I dealt with his proselytism by wiping his spit off my nose. Deal with it? Is this guy insane? Success doesn't come to those who deal with things, but to those who organize their lives well enough to avoid dealing with things. So I decided to outsmart the demon CULTURE SHOCK by enrolling at a university located less than 30 minutes from my parent's house.

Five years and a university education taught me that the only way to outsmart Culture Shock was to face it head on. So I packed up my storage bins, hugged my hometown goodbye, and journeyed to Ann Arbor, Michigan. Again, I thought I could outsmart culture shock by experiencing a mild form of it? Right? Wrong.

Before I become too distracted by my analysis I just wanted to say that I truly do love it here. I love that I am living on my own five hours away from my childhood home. I love that everything I need I can walk to from my apartment. I love that the people I've met here treasure learning and engaging with complicated ideas. I love that the city turns Mauze and Blue on Saturday football days...

But with the excitement of a new city comes the uncomfortable feeling of being a spy in enemy territory. I'm convinced that privacy is the child of routine. As the newly adopted family member, you lack the shared experiences that solidify random people into a cohesive whole.  While you experience the best acts of generosity, compassion, and love your new family has to offer, you live your life in a fishbowl.  As everyone tries you on for size, you don't know how to negotiate your newly allotted space.

In my short time in this beautiful city I am learning that culture shock goes deeper than differences in language, art, philosophy, or food. It is entirely possible for two people to speak the same language without understanding each other. I am also learning that my teacher was right. The best way to deal with culture shock is to deal with it.

The best way I've found to deal with it? I'll use learning how to canoe as a metaphor. Grab a friend who's never canoed either. Slap on a life jacket. Grab a water bottle. Climb in. Say a prayer. Hopefully you will both arrive at the loading dock at a reasonable hour. Albeit a little bruised and a little bit wet.

Sandwich Making: INFJ Style

Are you familiar with the Myers Brigg Personality test? If you're not, take the quiz here http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/jtypes2.asp first or the rest of this blog will make little sense.

I first discovered MB at the beginning of my sophomore year in college as I struggled to answer the infamous "who am I" question. A lot of my friends had a love-hate relationship with Myers Briggs because they received different results every time they took the test. Not so for me. I always have been, and very likely always will be an Introverted iNtuitive Feeling Judging person.

So what exactly is an INFJ? Great question. My dominant function is introverted intuition, meaning I spend a large part of my day inside my head. Since I orient myself internally, I am often oblivious to the external world.  I tend to make decisions emotionally, and weigh how my actions will affect others before moving forward. In the last part of my personality, my judging side, the universe decided to throw me a curve-ball. Introversion, intuition, and feeling tend to be very time-consuming states of being. Yet because I'm a J I loathe being late for anything. I'm still trying to figure out if being a time-conscious creative individual is a blessing or a curse.

The above description may have made little sense to you if you are a sensing person so I'll insert an example: sandwich making, INFJ style. With sandwiches I like variety, but I like to draw that variety from three or four options. There's also an emotional component to sandwich-making. Ham-and cheese on wheat means I am at peace with my internal world. Peanut butter and jelly on white means I'm stressed out and need someone to listen to me vent. Putting together a sandwich can tire me because I must remember where in the Kitchen we store the different parts of a sandwich as well as where to return them when I'm done.

Once I've composed said sandwich I need to take it and leave the kitchen as fast as possible in order to re-charge. I often leave behind crumbs, and/or jelly smeared knives. I'm not being lazy. I do not do this to test the patience of the next person who wants to make a sandwich. For me, as long as the bread and peanut butter are back in the cubbard I've acted in kindness towards my neater room mates. Having lived with neat room mates I know that crumbs are their version of nails on a chalkboard. Please be patient with me. I'm learning.

INFJ's often get confused with extroverts because we love people. And we do love people. There's nothing like a meaningful one-on-one conversation to give me warm and fuzzy feelings.We tend to be great listeners so we're never lacking for people to talk to.  But anything more than one or two people forces me to expend more energy than I receive. Group settings exhaust me because I bring to them the intensity that I bring to one-on one conversations. But since we love people so much we tend to deny our introverted tendencies in group settings, drain ourselves of all energy, then have to spend a week in our pajamas oscillating between sleeping and reading Victorian literature.

For everyone reading this blog because they're looking for better ways to communicate with an INFJ I'd say resist the urge to patronize when reminding us of a detail we've overlooked for the hundredth time. We also like to be affirmed in our actions because can see ourselves as weird because we've spent too much time analyzing our actions and not enough time externalizing them. It's also helpful to ask "What are you trying to say?" We won't be offended. We're often just as clueless as you are :)

Come Writers and Critics who Prophecy with Your Pens

One of my mentors warned me of the perils of following my passions with reckless abandon because passion is, by nature, seductively bi-polar. Perfecting that invention bound to revolutionize the digital world will make the inventor's day go by faster, as he spends his nights burning the midnight oil. My mentor offered this wisdom not to discourage me from recognizing and working towards my passions, but to recognize how my passions work to distract me from my larger life goals.

Case in point.

Three of my passions in life are post-World War II American History, women's labor history, and domestic fiction. I can and will talk anyone's ear off about Johnson's War on Poverty, Le Leche League feminists, and Bronte fiction. In college I followed these passions to degrees in American History, English Literature, and Women's Studies. While my passions relate to each other, I was glad to study them separably to avoid sensory overload, i.e burnout. 

This equal, but separated system worked well for me until 3 days ago when I started reading The Help by Kathryn Stockett. The novel is set in Jackson, Mississippi in my favorite year of all times: 1963. In 1963 I was negative 26, so I learned to experience  SCLC sit-ins, the March on Washington, Bob Dylan's rise to fame, and Kennedy's assassination either vicariously or through history books. Told through the eyes of three narrators: Skeeter, a 23 year old 5'11 recent English literature graduate forced to move home to Mississippi after failing to secure either a husband or a job during her 4 years at Ole Miss, Aibileen, a fifty something black maid who raises white babies after her only son's suspicious death, and Hilly, a thirty-five year old mother of seven who don't take no sass from her employees because she takes so much from her husband, these women risk everything to give the help a voice. 

Needless to say by page 12 I was hooked. I read the entire 500 plus page novel in 3 days. Three days where I only changed out of my pajamas to go to church or for a run. Three days I should have spent packing, or hanging out with friends one more time before I move 5 hours away from them. 

See the problem with passions is that quickly become all consuming and turn into obsessions. I was so consumed with oh-my-gosh-the-only-thing-that-separates-Skeeter-from-me-is-40 years-and frizzy hair that I gladly overlooked Stockett's butchery of southern dialect and glorification of the Civil Rights movement. 

Needless to say, by 8:18am this morning when I finished the novel I felt like that kid whose mom let them eat a Reese's peanut butter and cheesecake sundae so they would think twice before eating them together again. But like most kids, the thinking tends to last only as long as my stomachache. The Help did not rid me of my passions, but did help me think of my passions in new and interesting ways, albeit, with some reckless abandon.

Fantastc, Terrific, Great

I know that it's been a while since my last blog post. I've been quite busy! Last week I volunteered as a head counselor for the People of God Summer Camp. Let me share with you some of my experiences.

I arrived at camp two Saturdays ago on what felt like the hottest day of the year. While Pittsburgh is no Phoenix, Pittsburgh in July is quite hot. First on my to-do list was to decorate my cabin, the Firefly cabin. We female head counselors tend to go a bit overboard with our decorations, and this year was no exception. As fireflies I wanted our cabin to be very bright, so I hung enough Christmas lights to make any other lighting superfluous. Looking back it probably wasn't a good idea to plug 3 power strips into 2 outlets, but miraculously nothing melted or exploded during our week.

On Sunday afternoon my campers arrived and the madness began. While 8 campers, ranging in age from 9-12 doesn't seem like too much for 3 experienced counselors to handle, it at times was. Although my official title was "head counselor" my job description included mother, traffic director, swim coach, cheerleader, playwright, pastoral leader, performer, singer, master of disguise, teacher, mover, waitress, and shower assistant. Thankfully I had really well-behaved girls and my assistant and junior counselor excelled at the art of convincing exhausted campers that they really wanted to go to bed. 

My favorite part of camp was the Friday morning combined prayer time. My favorite head counselor calls Friday's "marathon day" because on top of our regular duties we counselors must: forfeit our afternoon break, invent a really nifty hiding place for "Capture the Counselor," and must stay awake until the wee hours of the morning decided which cabin won which award for the parent's program. But the Friday morning prayer time makes the rest of the day more than worth it.

As a teacher you don't always get the opportunity to witness your students "a-ha!" moments. That moment where the seeds you've sown take root and the child starts to take ownership of the plant. All week we'd been teaching the kids about charismatic worship and the gifts of the holy spirit. We talked about using our bodies to honor God by lifting our arms and clapping our hands. And all week my girls really weren't feeling it. It didn't matter how loud I sang or how high I raised my hands, my girls clung tightly to their songbooks and kept asking me what time it would end. Needless to say my expectations weren't too high at the beginning of the meeting.

One of the gifts of the Holy Spirit that we taught the girls about was prophecy, or sharing with the group a word or Scripture verse that God puts on their heart. To be honest, I'd always been pretty freaked out by the gift of prophecy because it requires...gulp... public speaking. But that Friday morning I felt God tugging on my heart to share with the group a word of encouragement. So I took a deep breath and made my way to the microphone. I don't remember very clearly what I said, but I could feel a change in my girls as I walked back to my seat. No longer did I have to work to convince the girls to participate in worship. They started singing the songs. Some of them even raised their hands. At the end of the meeting I lead a train around the Pavilion that every one of my girls participated in, even the "cool" ones!

The funny thing about "a-ha!" moments is that we usually recognize it in others before we recognize it in ourselves. That prayer meeting taught me two things: 1. It reminded me of the power of the Holy Spirit and the personal ways it speaks to everyone. 2. It reminded me that the girl's unwillingness to participate in worship annoyed me because they mirrored my own reluctance to fully engage. I now understand why we counselors abide by the motto, it's a privilege to serve at camp. God uses our obedience to his call of service as an opportunity to draw us closer into his presence, a feet that is truly FANTASTIC, TERRIFIC, GREAT ALL DAY LONG!

How Lucky Am I To Have Known Someone Who Is So Hard to Say Goodbye Too

Today marks the end of an era. Scarcely in life does the universe alert us mere mortals to its game plan. When the universe throws us a curve ball, it usually serves to kick the wind out of our sails and force us to change direction. Once in a while, however, change occurs gradually enough so as to allow us a moment to pause and reflect on our transition from one season in life to another.

Tomorrow I move out of my college apartment.

First, let's talk about space. The apartment's really nothing special, the first floor of a subdivided duplex leftover from Pittsburgh's steel mill days. Inside you'll find a kitchen with rocky chairs, two bedrooms, a living room /library/study/UCO hang-out, and a bathroom with excellent water pressure. Pretty typical student housing minus empty pizza boxes, week-old dirty dishes, and a smelly bathroom all thanks to my slightly- OCD roommate.

Ah, my roommate. She's the jelly to my peanut butter, the Wilson to my House, the ENFJ to my INFJ. We compliment each other so well, that people often run our names together the way relatives do with fraternal twins. We met at freshman orientation for commuter students. I remember sitting next to her because she was reading a book like it was the most natural thing to be doing while sitting in a room of complete strangers desperate to make friends. The Holy Spirit was definitely at work in us that day, though I didn't have the vocabulary for it at the time.

Over the last four years, Katie and I have been there for each other through the lose of a parent, all night term papers, Snowpocalypse, and the G-20. She sat next to me last April as took our final final exam and mourned the loss of our student identities. In Katie I've found a partner, an anchor, and a teacher. She's called me out on my bs, walked me through my meltdowns, and taught me to appreciate coffee. In her I've found a soul mate who's got my back and kicks my butt. From her I've learned that nothing in life stays static, and the trick is to change with the people you love, not try to change them.

Tonight as we have our last late night philosophical/theological/sociological chat in the 15213, we'll raise our plastic cups to our sisterhood in its past, present, and future incarnations.

I should probably pick up more ice cream.