Home's Feeling More Like Home

Everyday I come home, it feels more like home. There are less boxes clogging up the living room. Furniture is set up. New groceries like coffee grounds or bread are here. Most of these changes are due to the diligence of my beloved wife. This couldn't be home without her, really. Home is where the heart is. She went to the post office today and set up our mailbox. We are officially connected to the external world by snail mail. We have a weak connection online by a coffeehouse just down the street. Our landowners mentioned setting up a wireless connection for a fee soon. We'll jump on that. It would be so much cheaper than setting up a contract ourselves. There's so much left to do. Boxes to be broken down and put away. Insurance to be decided and set up. But everyday, home is more like home.

Work at the ESJ office continues to go well. Kate, the previous Work Study, came in and explained the process for cataloguing books and processing class evaluations. It turns out she didn't finish last semester's evaluations, even though Pat thought she had. This has become my first priority. Cataloguing the 8 boxes of donated literature is my next goal for the summer. If I accomplish these things by the semester's start, I will be in excellent shape. Still not sure how many hours I'll get a week during the summer. We don't know how much money we'll get for Work Studies until next week. Pat suggested to another administrative assistant that, if things get tight, she might have me work both offices. Apparently I'm the only Work Study hired this summer, despite other offices getting significantly expanded duties. Pat has seniority over everyone, so she got hers. I don't mind being shared. I sure can use the extra hours.

I went through the ESJ library today. It is a small but beautiful library filled with Christian literature. Apostolic Fathers, modern evangelicals, all huddled together and pondering the Truth. I have the urge to read again. I can't wait to get a chance to. As soon as my home is even more home.

Life Down Under

It's ironic that on this exhaustingly busy day I choose I have the time to write. I've had much more time other days, if not other weeks. I've expended more effort, loved more people, progressed my life further today than entire months I've lived this year. Maybe that is why I write. Because I finally have something worth writing. My life has meaning.

Jessica and I have safely made it to Kentucky. We have a spacious apartment within walking distance from my work, my school, a laundromat, a grocery store. Oh, and we live above a Subway. No joke. We could cut a hole in our floor and ask them to throw 6 inches up through it. We are truly surrounded by win. Life is still dispersed. Our rooms are full of boxes. Our furniture is coming down in two weeks with my parents. This is actually going to be the first night we're sleeping in the apartment because there was no power here the two days we've been staying in Wilmore. God turned it into a blessing, and Jessica's mom paid for a hotel room so we could have air conditioning.

Work has been especially pleasant. I work under a remarkable secretary named Pat Richmond. Pat has worked at Asbury for more than two decades. She's run this office longer than I've been alive. That alone should garner my respect. But beyond that, she's just an amazing person. She runs a charity where she furnishes houses for foreign students. She figures, after a 14-hour flight, the last thing they need is to sleep on sheetless beds and wake up to tables rigged from up-turned cardboard boxes. Her favorite story is of an Indian girl whose found a doll on her bed her first day in America. She's in college now and still has that doll. It meant that much to her.

Work wasn't perfect, though. I broke the typewriter today, my first day. I was writing labels and some got stuck to the roll. When I removed the roll and got it off, it wouldn't print the bottom part of letters. Apparently this happened to Pat before, so we just shrugged our shoulders and moved on.

Working here just one day has shown me a secret of the world: office file systems hold untold knowledge if a secretary keeps them full. There are at least twelve large metal drawers full of folders of various information about students, teachers, budgets, events, everything that has ever happened in the E. Stanley Jones School of World Missions and Evangelism. And it's one of my jobs to add more knowledge to those ravenous drawers. I am the dirt-marked minion who feeds the monsters. Know this and quake, for without my dutiful labors, they would eat you instead. But I jest...maybe. Best that I do my job well all the same.