Hey everybody!
As we head into June, let's take a minute to look back at the last couple of months of the semester. April was a good month for us around here. It was our last full month of school and a time of fond farewells as our graduating seniors wrapped up the final classes and planned their graduation parties.
Before all that though, we started the month with a big Easter celebration. Sarah and I and 5 of our students joined the Sturgis Church of Christ for morning assembly and then we all headed up the hill where my in-laws hosted a lovely Easter lunch. It was a great time full of fun and fellowship!
We officially started our Wednesday Night Tutoring program, which is really fun and low-key right now. I took my last trip up to Faith this school year and taught my final class until the Fall (my entourage of Hannah, Brooklyn, and David all joined me again). We hosted our monthly “Area-Wide Church Leader Eating Meeting,” which continues to grow as the area ministers get better at supporting and connecting with each other. Here is a cool picture Thomas took of our April meeting. It is one of those goofy panoramic ones, so you can see our whole room in one shot, but you have to squint a little because it has trouble fitting on a page:
Church Leader Eating Meeting 4.10.18
We still had larger-than-usual crowds of students at every church function, which has been a great encouragement to everyone. I'm busy scheming clever ways to get more space for our students since I think we are maxing out our current facilities. We also had a solid handful of individual Bible studies and counseling sessions going on. I also helped some students write their resumes and fix their broken cars. It struck me in April how much I play the part of “the dad” to our students. I'm really like “The Campus Dad” around here, which is nice.
We participated in a “Wellness Fair” to promote folks slowing down and being mindful. My vision for the fair was to have a series of laptops playing funny slow motion videos in loops, so when folks ask what we were doing, we could talk about the importance of slowing down. Unfortunately, I couldn't get enough laptops together and the whole thing turned into a mess. It ended up with one of our students, Kris Baker, and I just hanging out on a pair of yoga mats. The idea was to still promote slowing down and being mindful, but as it turns out, no one wants to talk to two random guys hanging out on yoga mats in the student union building. So we just chatted with each other the whole time. It was a bit of a wreck, but now I have a much clearer picture of what I want to accomplish next year.
We enjoyed an End Of The Year Party with a cookout that we managed to still pull off, even though it was raining. Big kudos to David for getting that fire going! We hung out and played games, talked through the up coming finals, and enjoyed a good time. We had 14 people there.
At the end of the month, we celebrated the graduation of several of our students. This year we graduated Brittany Begeman, Cassie Carter, and Chris Brown. Brittany has been a big part of our group for several years now. She was baptized back in November and has made huge changes in her life to be more like Jesus this year. She is going to be a preschool teacher in Minnesota. Cassie Carter has also been an active member of our group for years and has served as our club president for the last year. She is heading off to Indiana to pursue further education in Chemistry, so she can work in a lab somewhere and cure cancer for us all. Chris Brown grew up going to the Northern Hills Church of Christ, so he wins the award for the longest time being involved around here. He graduated with a degree in Agricultural Technologies and plans to stick around here and help his dad with the farm. All three of them are great young people and we are both sad to see them go and excited to see what they do next.
This year we also honored Rachel Munce who graduated last year, but in the hustle of last year's mission trip, we forgot to buy her a Bible, so we made it up to her this time. Here is a picture of the elders and I lining up to pray over our students:
Our Graduates, Elders, and I
“And this is my prayer: that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, so that you may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless until the day of Christ. . .”
- Philippians 1:9-10
Anyway, that's all for April. Thanks for reading and you have a great day!
-Silas