6 months in 1000 words or less

Well after far too long, I return to my blog. I apologize for the hiatus for the last 5 or 6 months, for once the business of life was not the culprit of my communication breakdown (not to say I haven't been busy) but rather the drone of a working man. College brought highs and lows, excitement, short term goals, tests, vacations, and dare I say it... Spanish. Needless to say, Starbucks provides much less excitement and much of my church work was front loaded, all of this snuffed my motivation and creativity. This is not to say that I have had nothing of note in the last few months and I've realized this, so here I am back to it.

I'll give you guys the quick recap of the last few months and then lets hit the ground running in 2010. OK well lets start here, I did end up with a job towards the end of the summer at Starbucks. One of my closest friends Dan Meeuwsen (M-you-son) had worked there for a year and went to bat for me. He called me one evening and said, hey we just lost a partner today (Starbucks is all lovey duby and doesn't have employees we are all partners... how cute :), he said bring in your resumé and application tomorrow and ask for Jarred, he's expecting you. I spent the night tweaking my resumé and in I went in the morning. Jared comes out from the back and takes my papers, thumbs through them for probably all of 25 seconds and says I'll call you Monday and set up training next week, welcome aboard. Holy Divine intervention, that is far from the corporate standard but I'll take it! It's been a good job so far, incredibly fast paced, low paying, but a hoot and I work with some great people. I typically get around 40 hours a week but in December I've been lucky to get 17 hours a week, because all of the students are gone on break and we don't have any customers.

My job at the Church continues. The training at the Church I wrote about in the summer concluded and went superb. Becca and I learned a ton about leading adults and training volunteers. The community groups at the Church launched with twice as many people as expected and they literally can't provide enough groups, as it stands the church could add a group of 15 every week for an entire year and still not keep up with the demand. On the college side, we experienced a similar response but were a bit more educated on our audience and were able to fulfil the demand with some slightly bloated groups. We have 9 full time groups and a few rogue groups as well. all in all we have about 150 college aged people involved in our groups.

My position on Staff with CCF (Collegiate Christian Fellowship) is Community group team leader and it has gone well thus far. Becca is my counterpart in this job as well and we have really enjoyed leading our peers! I have 9 guys under my care, and my job is to train, equip, support, and encourage them as they learn how to facilitate their own community groups. My job consists mostly of coffee meetings, dinners, phone calls, e-mails, and attending their groups to provide feedback and evaluation. I love it, but it sure is a lot of work! My job is officially for 10 hours a week but as you could imagine that job can take far more than 10 hours a week with a team of 9 that needs weekly attention. These guys are quality men and most of the time a pure joy to disciple, but they keep me on my toes at times :)

CCF also started a new exciting chapter in our life near the end of the summer, as we moved to a new location. We had been meeting for the last 6 years in the living room of the girls sorority house we own. We had crammed as many as 250 students in every nook and cranny of that house and had simply outgrown the space. We are leasing a 72'x72' square room with a commercial kitchen, bathrooms, and entryways from a dying local church. As a staff we put in countless hours on this project and have slowly been transforming a sterile room into a haven for our group. We've adopted the name "The Box" for our corporate worship times and a new name has been great! While the expansion has been great it also exposed many faults in the ministry and we've worked hard at addressing them, sometimes it takes a big change to expose the things you've become so accustomed to.

As far as the rest of my life goes, I've done a few fun things and enjoyed the freedom from school immensely. I was able to get to 3 Duck football games including an amazing road trip to the bay to watch our pathetic defeat at the hands of the Stanford Cardinal. But we spent the weekend with some great friends in San Francisco, and drove home through Nappa and Sonoma, not too shabby! I spend a good amount of time following the NHL and specifically my beloved Red Wings. I'm hoping to fly back to Detroit later this year to catch a match up.

Well I think that's a pretty fair recap and general overview of the last 6 months or so. I'm hoping to get back to the routine of posting at least once a week. Thanks for continuing on this journey of my life!

~B