Service Learning Hour 1

Most people have new year’s resolutions.  I never could muster the gumption or enthusiasm to do so.  I blame it on Saturday morning cartoons.  Wolverine, Spiderman, and the hip and cool Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles created a heaven and starry sky too vast, too mysterious, and too ambitious an appetite for me to simply twiddle my thumbs to something as mundane as a resolution.

Enter, year seven of college. I’m highly unorganized, could care less about detail, re check myself and yup, I still get on people’s nerves, and answer the call to the coveted Office of Student Activities to sign my student organization up for the school year 2011- 2012.  It’s a small packet of Xerox madness that requires a lot of detail and commitment.  What is the name of your Organization? [please don’t put MSU, and athletic organizations please don’t use ‘Bobcats’ or MSU in name of organization it reads]  What is the mission statement and purpose of your organization it then asks?  Who are the two officers primarily responsible for the leadership and maintenance of your organization?  My ninja of an advisor scribbles down his information and dispenses jibberish wisdom in Yoda like fashion as a reminder to me to be courteous and responsible in filling out the rest of the application.  I read the fine print on the back and initial.  I then sing an ancient love hymn- seductive and bordering on bribery to get the 10 nearest students to sign my sheet making it legit and operational. [I didn’t really do that, but it was a record time in acquiring those signatures].  I then list a couple of events we will be sponsoring as a group and I am pretty sure I spelled summit wrong [according to this spell check and my chicken scratch on the club application, I did in fact spell it wrong].

I then do my fat boy victory dance, war hoop, and am determined to count coup on the buffet in the dining hall.

It’s exhausting and the real work hasn’t even begun.  In the next 15 weeks I will spend over a hundred hours alone prepping, organizing, traveling for, and leading the newly named ‘Nations Life Group’ a group designed to authenticate and put Christ at the center of American Indian culture and American Indian students’ lives.  In the ensuing semester we will talk about sin, salvation, sex, humor, suffering, dating, marriage, stewardship, spiritual gifts and a slew of doctrinal and theological cadences resembling the brimstone and hellfire Calvinist tradition.  It is my job to creatively and passionately engage, recruit, and teach the group on top of casting vision and providing counsel on an individual basis.  It’s no cake walk, but with prayer, humility, and grace, the will of the almighty might be done.  

I’m a sinner. I’m imperfect.  I falter.  I trip.  I’m no better.  I cry.  I smile.  I laugh.  I hope.  I seek.

And yet I can’t wait to tell others about it as well.  It starts with the paperwork.