I’ve spent the last couple of days being challenged and stretched in a lot of ways. From making myself be observant at Willow Creek to planning out an 8-minute testimony presentation to really thinking hard about Grace, Forgiveness, trust, the Love of God, and having a vision and mission in Missions.
Today was no less of a learning experience, but I didn’t bounce around from being exhausted and replenished all day, and my brain was really thankful for that. We started off this morning watching a ministry video and praying for Sammy, an IT missionary headed for Cameroon to evangelize unreached people groups. It’s incredible to realize how many people have come through this building and organization and are connected to each other through shared values and through faith in Christ.
Our Bible study with Rich went through Abraham, Isaac and Jacob today, and I don’t think I’ve ever really thought of any of the people involved in those stories the same way. I could write my whole post on this alone, but since my current goal is cataloging my time in Elgin, maybe I’ll revisit this next week. Suffice it to say that although I see Abraham as a lot less of a mythical figure and in a lot more human way now, I hope I never have to have the failings of my faith thrown at me by Pharoh (the world).
Scott Olson took us through the completion of our overview of International Teams vision and values. I’m still stunned at how many hours the CEO of ITeams USA would spend with us lowly MITs, but have appreciated his honesty and his passion for doing things right. If you have the desire, you should totally read through International Teams USA’s 14 values (which can be found here). We spent a good deal of time today working through each one of these and I both love them and agree that while maybe we should be more vision-based, International Teams does a fantastic job of living out these values.
Lunch was more taco salad, which was great because I don’t think you can ever be tired of taco salad. It does seem funny how we (John Andrew and I, at least) keep bouncing back and forth from (vaguely) Italian to Mexican food with taco salad, pizza, taco salad, lasagna, and fajitas. The trend seems to be continuing as well, with more pizza and enchiladas on the way.
This afternoon our mystery roommate showed up too. Jacob thought he’d had a screw from previous surgery puncture his jaw. Turned out to be a lot less of a problem than that, and he was able to make it to training, so once Nate’s wife and eldest son arrive tonight, all of the MITs who were scheduled for this module will actually be here.
We continued today with Cross-Cultural Communication, which I feel like I have a pretty good grasp of, but you just can’t have enough of those classes and always learn something new (or at least get to exchange hilarious stories, that even among missionaries have a tendency to be accidentally dirty). Finally, we rounded out classes with an orientation to IT Information Systems. Nicole joked as I came in that I could be teaching it, and at the end I actually realized I could have, but that’s mostly because of my experience last year and my Curious George mentality whenever I get some kind of new account activated (I was the only one in the room who knew I had and International Teams e-mail, which I’ve had redirected to Thunderbird since Dave sent me my ITeams financial password in March).
Before you think I have a superiority complex, I’ll just tell you how terribly I did at another kind of bouncing around. We played basketball this afternoon, and I’ve never been very good at it, but I’d like to think I was at least okay at shooting after all the hoops we played in the Alliance Academy gym last summer. Whatever progress I’d made during Quito Quest 2008, I’ve lost in the last ten months, but it was still enough fun that we shot baskets and played HORSE for nearly four hours. John Andrew and I were there that whole block, with Ted, Nicole, Bill, and Jacob joining and then taking off at various times over that period. When the three of us came back to our apartment, we were pretty shot, and really dirty.
We recovered just long enough to get hungry, and had an adventure in cooking fajitas. I’ll be much more efficient next time, and that’s as much story as you’re getting out of that one.
