My First Four Weeks of MTC

            Wow.  The past month has flown by.  Honestly I don’t feel like a completely different person but in the same respect I feel like a new person in other aspects.  I still have a quirky sense of humor, still love to play sports and run, still enjoy hanging out with friends despite work to do but in other aspects I feel so much more developed.  In terms of leading a group of adolescents, preparing my own food and even positively taking constructive criticism I feel my skills in those areas has exponentially increased. 

            Going off the fact that I haven’t starved to death or suffered an extreme deficiency in any of the food groups I count that as a success.  During my three-day pilgrimage from Pennsylvania to Mississippi I started my new diet off strong by eating almost exclusively McDoubles and Fries.  Once I arrived at Oxford I stopped at Wal-Mart and picked up bread, peanut butter and jelly and frozen pizzas.  Clearly my diet was not sustainable and that first week I frequently felt lethargic and added vegetables to my diet for the second week.  The second years stressed the importance of taking care of yourself and eating well to avoid sickness.  Over the past two weeks I’ve added tuna, lunchmeat, spaghetti and macaroni and cheese.  My diet is still nowhere near where it needs to be but I haven’t lost much weight and I try to go to chick-fil-a at least twice a week.  In retrospect the advancements in my diet are an accurate barometer of the life progress I’ve made down here. Before coming to Oxford a month ago I never cooked for myself.  I survived four years of college on meals at Hicks and frequent late night runs to Sheetz. 

            Looking at other areas of my life my dependence on God has been another great improvement.  Not that I tend not to rely on Him as much but when times are going rough it is phenomenally encouraging to know have just a small glimpse of the depth of Christ’s love.  When I was down in Haiti for 8 days following the earthquake on my Easter break I remember the constant fear that my life was in danger.  As we were driving through slums in Cap-Haitian or sleeping in a ‘safe’ hotel room in a brauffle without a lock on the door I knew my life was in danger.  As scary as some of those memories are they are also amazing awesome because I needed to rely on Christ to sustain me.  Returning to America I realized just how comfortable our lives are.  When our lives are comfortable that frequently means that we don’t need to rely on Christ because we are tempted to think ‘I can take of this myself’.  In reality we are so broken and going in alone typically leads in failure in frustrating.  In some respects I feel as though I’ve been thrown into a gauntlet in Mississippi that is far from home, is absent of almost anyone I know from college and Philadelphia and is testing me about whether I really want to teach.  Overall the first four weeks of summer training have been extremely challenging but also extremely rewarding because my dependence on Christ has grown so much.

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