this is no longer my blog

The past few days have been a bit tiring. Allow me to explain:

First, Supervising has been gone. Originally, he planned to take this week as vacation with the intention of doing some work around the house or some preparation for his younger daughter's upcoming wedding. Unfortunately, his mother-in-law passed away, so his vacation was spent driving down to Arkansas for the funeral and to help take care of those matters. So, I've been here "in charge" most of this week... Although, I won't pretend that I was really in charge, because we have a secretary and parish administrator here who, as any church secretary can tell you, do a large amount of running the show.

Then, we had a member in the hospital. Polyps in his colon, which is never a good thing. So he was in for surgery to remove a large part of his colon. His surgery was on Tuesday, and I contemplated whether or not to stop in and see him Tuesday afternoon, but I figured I would give him some time to recover before he had to put up with visitors. So, Wednesday morning I went to the hospital. I heard voices in his room, so I knocked on the door and I heard him say, "Come in!" but then I heard another voice say, "No, don't." So I peeked in and saw a doctor hunched over the bed examining the incision. So I lingered in the hallway, thinking it might just be a brief check, and I looked at a picture on the wall and pretended to be interested in it. Then, a young cleaning lady who I had seen bopping in and out of rooms doing her cleanining duties came up, stood right next to me, looked at the picture and then looked at me. I looked at her, then back at the picture, then back at her... Sure enough, she was still looking at me. So, trying to be polite, I said, "Hello..." She may have responded, but I don't remember. What I do remember is that she continued to stare at me. I turned and continued to look at the picture, and after a couple more seconds of staring she went back to cleaning. It was weird. So I decided that, in order to prevent that from happening again, I would leave and come back to visit him later on that morning. About an hour later I returned and was able to talk to both him and his wife for about 10 minutes before a nurse came in and started talking about getting him cleaned up, which from the sounds of it was going to include a sponge bath. I decided to give him some privacy, so that he could maintain his dignity. He seemed appreciative. I have to go and check and see how he's doing today. Hopefully he's received some good news from the doctor!

Thirdly, Wednesday night we had a lock-in for the senior high youth at the cabin owned by one of our members. Now, those of you in other parts of the country might think of a cabin as being in the mountains or a heavily wooded area. Perhaps by a lake or a stream. Yeah... not so much. Sure, it's by some woodland, but not what I'd consider heavily wooded, and it's about a ten minute drive from the church. Surrounded by a lot of farmland. No streams or lakes. But a nice little location to "get away." When they had talked about having a lock in, again, I requested that it not be on a Saturday night. Since school has officially ended, we decided to have it on a weekday evening. This lock-in had a smaller attendance than our previous one, and there weren't as many organized activities. It did bring out they dynamics of our youth committee, however. There seems to be two factions in our committee, and this was very obvious as we talked about planning this lock in. One faction thought it should have a Survivor theme, and they started buying things that would be appropriate for a Survivor themed lock in. They asked me to lead the Bible study that would take place that evening and to somehow incorporate the theme of Survivor into this Bible study. The other faction, planned something else entirely and one of the mothers had the Bible study figured out already. So one day before the lock in was to take place, the youth committee met to finalize plans, and presented each other with these differing proposed schedules. Now, to be fair, both were willing to compromise and we ended up with a combination of the two, but the mother seemed unwilling to even consider relinquishing the Bible study. At the meeting, she was telling us all about these kids that she knew were coming and how some of them had told her that a few others were planning on coming. However, the youth she said were coming did not show up and the youth she said that they mentioned didn't show up, either. But the youth that did show up seemed to have a good time, and we enjoyed the outdoors, and I got to drive through the woods on a golf cart and we placed my lawn gnomes in several places throughout the woods to help guide the youth on a scavenger hunt that we had planned. A fun time seemed to be had by all, especially the gnomes.

The day after the lock in (yesterday), which one normally spends sleeping and recuperating from the previous nght's lack of sleep, was spent back out at the cabin cleaning, and getting photos developed. Our softball team was scheduled to play a game last night, as well, against the other Lutheran church in town. There seems to be a good natured rivalry between the two teams, so our team's organizer had spent a good amount of time trying to recruit good players to come for that game, so that we could at least put up a decent fight against the other team. I figured that there would be a lot of people and I wouldn't be asked to play, so I was in no hurry to get to the ballpark. So after spending some time at the home of a family from church, and enjoying a margarita, I made it out the ballfield after the game had already started. Turns out that only 9 people had shown up, and we needed to have 10. Coincidentally, someone had brought an extra mit. They asked me to play and I decided that I would. Well, to make a long story short, I did, indeed, get a hit and actually made it home!! I scored a run for my team!! Yay for me! Some of us had planned on going out to eat afterwards, but I was exhausted by that time, so I chose the option of going home and resting instead.

In other news, I have about two months and one week left of my internship. Doesn't seem as if I should be that far along, yet. When I was still only contemplating what my internship would look like, I figured I'd have accomplished a lot more by this point. I wasn't sure what it was I would have accomplished, only that I would have. But it really doesn't seem as if I have enough to show for my 9+ months of internship. I have a desk piled with too many papers, a small collection of drawings given to me by some of the kids (mostly small kids, but a few big ones, too), a pile of photographs - mostly of the youth making strange faces and showing me the food in their mouths, a drawer full of sermon manuscripts, and a broken computer printer... Are these the trappings of an accomplished intern?