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.