A Much Needed Update

I want to apologize to my few faithful readers. I know I kind of left you all with a cliff-hanger from the last post. I honestly didn’t realize how busy my life would be these last couple of months. Work, my personal life and just the day to day has been incredibly busy and I feel like I haven’t stopped to breathe until right now.

I know a lot of you are waiting to hear how my first meeting went with my mentor and part of my delay in post has been because of that. Our meetings together have a great level of confidentiality and trust built in, and I really want to be careful to not break that confidentiality or trust. So I’m sorry that I can’t share with you on this public forum if I was able to tell her about the entirety of who I am. If you are really dying to know, please feel free to email me, call me, ask me to go to coffee. I’d love to share with you how that first meeting went on that front.

I went to meet her and as you can imagine I was pretty nervous. I’m not very good with opening up to others on first meetings; I’m usually pretty closed and cautious. It’s a barrier that I cause on my own, and am pushing myself to step out a little. I was also kind of scared as to what was going to be happening in my spiritual life as a result of the next 8-9 months going through this process and this meeting was stepping out of the starting gate for me.

I drove up to a church very similar to the one I grew up in, brick and columns, great landscaping, multiple buildings for programs and activities, and in a family-oriented community. The surroundings made me feel more comfortable, but I quickly realized that I was much different now than the Britt who grew up in Martin UMC. I walked up to the administration building and introduced myself to the secretary at the front, told her who I was and that I was there to meet my mentor. She smiled warmly and invited me to take a seat and to wait a few minutes while she let he know I was there.

My mentor came around the corner with a warm and welcoming spirit, introduced herself and led me around the corner to her office. We sat and talked for about an hour and a half. I was so nervous I talked for the majority of the time, DOPE! The completely opposite thing that I would normally do when meeting a new person. After I left I felt awful about this, I’m there to learn and let my nerves get in the way of my interest in getting to know her and learning from her experience. I’m sure she could tell I was nervous and was overcompensating with my lack of conversation skills.  We decided to meet again in early January, and I’ve been really excited about it ever since!

I’m really excited about learning from someone who can help and support me in my call to ministry because they’ve been in a similar place of following God’s call. I was thinking the other day how long it had been since I’ve had someone who has taken this role in my life; it’s been since high school or even middle school. SOOO much has happened in my life since then that honestly it’s a miracle that I’ve made it this far on my own. That’s a long time to go feeling that you are on this journey by yourself. So I’m really excited about this new mentor relationship that is forming and will help awaken in me tools for my journey.

This coming year is going to be filled with a lot of life changing events/decisions/random occurrences. I’m looking forward to it and trembling at the thought of it. I’ve decided to take things slower than I normally had planned. I was going to apply for seminary for the Fall of 2010 but have decided to postpone that for another year. I feel at peace with the decision and see new opportunities that I can experience because of it. 1) I don’t know what is going to come of my candidacy process and would like to be able to make a decision about seminary when I’m able to fully focus on that. As well as to be able to properly deal with anything that happens where I will need proper space and time to deal with. 2) I would like to take the mentor portion of this process as it was meant to be, a process, not something that needs to be rushed through in order to receive more funding for grad school (to those of you who did that, no hard feelings towards you, I just need to do it a different way). 3) I have a job that’s teaching me every day what it means to meet the needs of the world; I still have some more learning to do from this job. 4) I would like to spend some time volunteering and being more a part of my community. I would like to be able to do that for just the purpose of enjoying it.

So I have another busy year of growing into myself! I will try to keep you all updated with what is going on a little better than I have in the past few months. If I fail at it please forgive me, or better yet, just pick up the phone and call me, email me or facebook me. I’d love to share with you the adventure that I am on!