Rough Draft (Midnight Inspiration) My Testimony Part I
I have spent the last ten years of my life Running from God. Now he is smacking me on the head with a two-by-four and strongly encouraging me to follow where he leads. I have always had a knack for working with children and as I have gotten older, youth (once Youth was no longer synonymous with My Peer Group).
For some reason, one I have yet to figure out, the idea of working with kids for God has terrified me. Not that I haven’t worked off and on in church ministry for the past 16 years! I started helping with Sunday School when I was in fifth grade (I helped Mrs. Heinz with six first-grade girls!) I progressed to teaching Vacation Bible School, singing in the Teen Praise Band (We were The Sonsations!), performing in Drama Ministry, and practically running the Church Nursery!
My education history is not a record of which I am proud. I found school uninteresting, very slow moving, and not challenging. I rarely did any actual schoolwork beyond the occasional project, unfortunately, in my opinion, I was smart and did very well on standardized tests, which kept the schools from ever holding me back. Overall, school was an incredibly painful experience, albeit in spite of everything, an educational one. To put it bluntly, I was young, unmotivated and made many poor choices along the way regarding my education.
When I hit my senior year of high school, I had no idea what I wanted “to be when I grew up,” other than “get married and have at least nine kids!” I decided that I would proclaim my dream to be an elementary school teacher, and figured I should graduate high school “on time” and so put just a bit more effort into passing my classes, rather, I turned in most of my assignments. I ended up on Honor Roll that final semester, (my freshman year GPA was 0.067).
My parents have always encouraged my sisters and I to go to college, with the rule being that we had to live On Campus the first year. So, I applied to the first school that recruited me, Concordia College Ann Arbor (it was not yet a University.) And they actually let me in, Boy, was I was surprised! Granted, I was on Academic Probation, limited to 13 credit hours, but still, I didn’t expect anything higher than community college! When asked if I wanted to be a Lutheran School Teacher, I basically said “Sure, Why not?” I didn’t really want to be a teacher, and I didn’t really think I wanted to work for the church, I just figured it was a logical path to follow to work with kids and hopefully find a husband. Alas, I discovered that it was way more fun to stay up all night playing Yahoo! Euchre and downloading music on Napster, than it was to study or attend class. My parents asked me how I was doing in school and I outright lied to them every weekend when I went home to do laundry. So, Winter came and I was expelled for Academic reasons. I actually petitioned to get back in and then proceeded to make the exact same mistakes. In retrospect, I sabotaged myself on purpose, I was afraid to grow up. I surrounded myself with slackers and blamed my mistakes on my own immaturity.
Enter R.O. Smith and Isaac Bartholomew (I think...), recruiters from Springhill Camps in Evart, MI! One of the girls from my dorm, Beth, had worked there the previous summer and it sounded even cooler than Girl Scout Camp. R.O. and Isaac were good recruiters, Beth and I went to Starbucks with them and I threw away the application to work at Girl Scout Camp that very night! I applied to work as a Special Needs Counselor, but the spots were all filled up, so I accepted an Assistant Cook Position. At staff training, I almost drowned in the Manistee River and learned that I am not a strong swimmer - lost my favorite hat and my camera, but my inhaler floated right into Taylor’s fishing net (he was one of the musicians that summer). I LOVED Springhill, but I HATED God for putting me in the kitchen. I was so ungrateful that summer. What’s crazy is people were so nice to me, and I spent so much of that summer jealous of so many of them for being happy with what they’d been given.
I spent a good part of the next school year as an After-School child-caregiver at my sisters’ elementary school. I reapplied to Springhill, once again for as a Special Needs Counselor, and this time I got it - for half the summer anyway, the first half of the summer I was a Cook (no longer an Assistant - still the exact same job.) One thing that Springhill asks of its Staff, is that everyone write their Testimony. I struggled with “My Testimony” and avoided every actually sharing myself with anyone. (I still struggle with it actually). Everyone else seemed to have such Awesome stories of how they came to know Christ or how they accepted Jesus into their heart or how they were into drugs and sex and bad stuff and God saved them from it, all I could come up with was that I was a Lutheran and my Grandpa was a Pastor and I went to church and my testimony was boring. Oddly, I worked at a Christian camp and I was afraid to share Jesus.
I have spent the following years as a babysitter, janitor (cleaning the UofM locker rooms), Meijer cashier, Borders Inventory Processing Team Member, Talking Book World Clerk, Assistant Preschool/Toddler Teacher at HOTS and back to being a Meijer Cashier.
For some reason, one I have yet to figure out, the idea of working with kids for God has terrified me. Not that I haven’t worked off and on in church ministry for the past 16 years! I started helping with Sunday School when I was in fifth grade (I helped Mrs. Heinz with six first-grade girls!) I progressed to teaching Vacation Bible School, singing in the Teen Praise Band (We were The Sonsations!), performing in Drama Ministry, and practically running the Church Nursery!
My education history is not a record of which I am proud. I found school uninteresting, very slow moving, and not challenging. I rarely did any actual schoolwork beyond the occasional project, unfortunately, in my opinion, I was smart and did very well on standardized tests, which kept the schools from ever holding me back. Overall, school was an incredibly painful experience, albeit in spite of everything, an educational one. To put it bluntly, I was young, unmotivated and made many poor choices along the way regarding my education.
When I hit my senior year of high school, I had no idea what I wanted “to be when I grew up,” other than “get married and have at least nine kids!” I decided that I would proclaim my dream to be an elementary school teacher, and figured I should graduate high school “on time” and so put just a bit more effort into passing my classes, rather, I turned in most of my assignments. I ended up on Honor Roll that final semester, (my freshman year GPA was 0.067).
My parents have always encouraged my sisters and I to go to college, with the rule being that we had to live On Campus the first year. So, I applied to the first school that recruited me, Concordia College Ann Arbor (it was not yet a University.) And they actually let me in, Boy, was I was surprised! Granted, I was on Academic Probation, limited to 13 credit hours, but still, I didn’t expect anything higher than community college! When asked if I wanted to be a Lutheran School Teacher, I basically said “Sure, Why not?” I didn’t really want to be a teacher, and I didn’t really think I wanted to work for the church, I just figured it was a logical path to follow to work with kids and hopefully find a husband. Alas, I discovered that it was way more fun to stay up all night playing Yahoo! Euchre and downloading music on Napster, than it was to study or attend class. My parents asked me how I was doing in school and I outright lied to them every weekend when I went home to do laundry. So, Winter came and I was expelled for Academic reasons. I actually petitioned to get back in and then proceeded to make the exact same mistakes. In retrospect, I sabotaged myself on purpose, I was afraid to grow up. I surrounded myself with slackers and blamed my mistakes on my own immaturity.
Enter R.O. Smith and Isaac Bartholomew (I think...), recruiters from Springhill Camps in Evart, MI! One of the girls from my dorm, Beth, had worked there the previous summer and it sounded even cooler than Girl Scout Camp. R.O. and Isaac were good recruiters, Beth and I went to Starbucks with them and I threw away the application to work at Girl Scout Camp that very night! I applied to work as a Special Needs Counselor, but the spots were all filled up, so I accepted an Assistant Cook Position. At staff training, I almost drowned in the Manistee River and learned that I am not a strong swimmer - lost my favorite hat and my camera, but my inhaler floated right into Taylor’s fishing net (he was one of the musicians that summer). I LOVED Springhill, but I HATED God for putting me in the kitchen. I was so ungrateful that summer. What’s crazy is people were so nice to me, and I spent so much of that summer jealous of so many of them for being happy with what they’d been given.
I spent a good part of the next school year as an After-School child-caregiver at my sisters’ elementary school. I reapplied to Springhill, once again for as a Special Needs Counselor, and this time I got it - for half the summer anyway, the first half of the summer I was a Cook (no longer an Assistant - still the exact same job.) One thing that Springhill asks of its Staff, is that everyone write their Testimony. I struggled with “My Testimony” and avoided every actually sharing myself with anyone. (I still struggle with it actually). Everyone else seemed to have such Awesome stories of how they came to know Christ or how they accepted Jesus into their heart or how they were into drugs and sex and bad stuff and God saved them from it, all I could come up with was that I was a Lutheran and my Grandpa was a Pastor and I went to church and my testimony was boring. Oddly, I worked at a Christian camp and I was afraid to share Jesus.
I have spent the following years as a babysitter, janitor (cleaning the UofM locker rooms), Meijer cashier, Borders Inventory Processing Team Member, Talking Book World Clerk, Assistant Preschool/Toddler Teacher at HOTS and back to being a Meijer Cashier.