God Series

I apologize for my delay of almost a full month in getting a new blog post. These past three weeks have been a bit hectic. For the first weeks of this month I was getting sick with a frustrating frequency and the last round landed me in the hospital for an afternoon just about 2 weeks ago. It wasn't anything serious and fortunately hasn't happened since but the doctors think I might have developed a lactose intolerance.

About the same time I started getting sick my boss was hospitalized for a pulmonary embolism. She has since been released but is still not back at work. So life is a bit crazy at work.

To add to the chaotic-ness of life, I have had about 4 different blog ideas mulling around in my head, so this is the first of those thoughts and reflections that I will hopefully getting posted within the next couple of weeks.

This past Friday we had a continuing education day focused on spiritual direction. During the day, our leader asked us to reflect on a “God Moment” in our lives. This is a moment where we have been aware of how God has worked in our lives-be in a big or small way.

As I prepare to head to Nebraska to present about Interfaith week at the Council of Synod Lutheran Youth Organization Presidents, I found myself reflecting on how it is that I have arrived at this place in my life and thought I would share this with you.

As you are all aware, I spent this past spring semester completing my Social Work Practicum at Interfaith Youth Core in Chicago. It was a fantastic semester. Towards the end of this semester as I was sitting in the lunch room at IFYC talking with one of my co-workers. We started talking about how it was that I had found myself at IFYC. While I had always said it was because I had heard Eboo speak at Luther and been a part of one of their trainings.

He, however, mentioned that this was probably not the whole story, because there was a reason that Eboo had come to Luther. Eboo had come to Luther because several months prior to his coming to Luther, somebody in the administration had decided to give a survey to the Luther community. When the results of this survey came in, somebody looked at the results and decided that Luther needed to pay more attention to Religious Pluralism.

This decision was taken seriously. The freshmen were required to Acts of Faith, Eboo came to deliver the opening convocation message and an IFYC trainer came to do a Religious Pluralism training for leaders in College Ministries. Because of this series of events, I ended up at IFYC in Chicago.

Continuing this series of events, while at IFYC , I found out I was not accepted into the ELCA’s Young Adult in Global Mission program. Because I no longer knew what I was doing in the fall, I had to begin making new plan. During this time, I happened to stay at the office late one night at which point one of my co-workers invited me to apply to spend the summer at Chautauqua Institution. Because of my relationship with IFYC, I was accepted to spend the summer as the Christian Coordinator for the Abrahamic Program for Young Adults.

This was a fantastic summer, and the flexibility of the summer allowed me to have time to send out my resume and job application to a variety of random programs, including the Episcopal Service Corps. I was also able to schedule an interview with the NEWARKACTS branch of the ESC and accept a position with them.

In many ways, I am here because sometime previous to last fall, somebody at Luther College decided to make Religious Pluralism at Luther a priority. This isn’t so much a God moment, but a God series and the many ways God has worked through a variety of unexpected “Yeses” and “No’s” in my life.