this is no longer my blog

Okay, now I know most of you are probably getting bored with all of my posts concerning my upcoming ending to my internship, and believe me, I am, too. Sometimes I wish the end would just get here and then I wouldn't have to do all this waiting and detaching and leave taking and I could just focus on other things that need to be done. But it isn't working that way, unfortunately, and this whole saying good bye thing is a process and not just an event. So, since my blog is about the events in my life, and the end of my internship is a pretty major event in my life, well, then, of course my blog will be dominated by the end of my internship. And if you don't like it... well... TOO BAD!

Well, then. Now that we've got that out of the way, tonight I had my final Internship Committee meeting. The Internship Committee is the group of concerned citizens whom I met with once a month to talk about my internship, chart my progress, discuss joys and concerns... All of that stuff. They were also lay members of the congregation who were responsible for evaluating me at several stages in the game: 3 months, 6 months, 1 year. Now, normally this group consists of six members, but because of a few circumstances beyond our control (one went to Iraq for a year and the other, who was a youth, had a falling out with several other of the youth who were the reason he was a member of this church in the first place, so when his friendship deteriorated so did his involvement) we only had four. One was a young man about my age, then there was another man maybe 10 or 15 years older, and then two women who are both about the same age as my mom. These women dominated the committee. Each have a son about my age and so they felt it was their need to protect and care for me (which really came in handy one day when I was sick and one of them brought over a care package of soup and crackers and jello and pudding and tylenol. Very nice!). But when it came time for evaluations, they never felt as if they could list any growing edges. On either the three month or the mid-term they wrote that I had exceeded their expectations, and that they could not think of any growing edges. The middle aged man, who comes from a business background, tried to push the idea that there is always room for improvement, and that it wasn't an insult to say that I could improve in certain areas. But the moms would have none of it, and what they wrote originally stayed in the evaluation. Now that's funny, because I'm well aware of the areas that I need to improve in. And maybe the women felt the need to protect me, or maybe they actually did believe that I didn't need to improve, or perhaps it was some combination of the two. But it provided me with a laugh and Supervising got a consternated look on his face after reading. I guess afterwards he went and had some words with the committee, telling them if they didn't give me growing edges than I didn't know where I needed to improve. I should have told him that there were a few vocal people who had no problem alerting me of my growing edges.

But anyway, tonight was our last meeting, and we went over their final evaluation of me. It was touching, even though I knew they were going to say good things about me, to sit there and read such good things about me; to realize that this group of people sees such potential in you, and that it so wonderfully affirms the direction that you are headed. My eyes watered a bit, but I managed to control myself, because I knew if I started crying at this stage in the game that it would all be drastically downhill after that.

And now I have no more internship committee meetings, which is weird to think about. So that's one more thing off of my checklist of things to do before I'm done. Have I told you, yet, that it feels extremely weird to be this far along already? That it feels unreal and impossible?

Well, it does.