My Community- Defined as Where I live

Today, for the first time in a while I was reminded that the community I live in is very unlike me. A couple students and I talked for a whilr about how this is too urban for them and how rural it was for me. Being that I'm only thirty minutes from Pittsburgh, it's not bad, but some things are challenging me if I only remain in town.
This community challenges me to be enthusiastic about a 6 point deer that a student shot and stay away from the stores on the first day of deer hunting season as it's an official school holiday & everyone is holiday shopping. The public library follows the school district schedule and was closed today when I tried to hang out and get books out, forcing me to be creative with my free time. Within walking distance, there is only a bar, which I avoid as students spend a lot of time there, nothing around here helps us think outside the box with programming options. My car is getting quite the workout from the hills and I'm learning to stop when it snows because of steep snowy/icy roads are not fun.

Back to the grind

After a great 21 days away, I'm back and resettled into school and work. As much as I like having a routine, some of my feeling about being here have come right back again. It only took one day of classes to be rolling my eyes at what we are doing and be very thankful I brought back my youth ministry books.

The line up this semester is:
Research- aka: what youth worker blog, twitter, resource or online community can I find the information I need in

Assessment and Evaluation- aka: assessing what is going on (um, surveys when you first start a position anyone?), and evaluation is making changes based on the information you assessed.

The professor asked us what our experience has been with this, let's see, I walked into my job and had to assess the status of the ministry, the students spiritual maturity and the church culture, listen to God and go forward with changes via instituting a programming model & budget request. That was in the first month.

One of the new things I can learn is the formal surveys that all colleges use- I already know about one and was working with it at NCSA- Oh! And I was doing so without any classroom time...lookie at that~

Student Development- Learning about some more theorists, reading the book again that I bought and read last year, writing some more papers similar to the ones I wrote in undergrad child psych. We are going to spend a lot of time on a model of how to make changes, yea, I think I've made a lot of changes to ministries, policies and procedures in my time, not plagiarizing myself will be the biggest challenge.

So I'll say it again, grad school is a way God got me here and I need to do the work to remain here but it's not why I'm here. Maybe more so it's to be Christ's light in the program. Yesterday I had a long conversation about another students break and some family challenges she encountered. I'm in some ways shocked because I barely talked with her last term mainly because of scheduling and she was that open with me. That's not the first conversation I've had of great life substance, most likely not the last.