community is not who God is

Ever since returning from Jamaica this year- I've been hitting a brick wall each time I sit down to write this post. It's practice for me to write a follow up blog from the experience I've had, but every time I sat down to write, there was nothing.

It's not that it wasn't a great trip- it was really, really good. I just haven't been able to put words to what I was feeling or learning.

I finally had something written down about two weeks ago but I didn't know how to end it, so I let it be. It felt fake and forced. It felt like the right thing to write to make everybody feel good about me and where I'm at, but wasn't reflective of how I was actually feeling.

So bear with me; I'll get to the trip in a second, but to understand my experience on the trip, you have to first understand how I had been feeling as a human over the past several months.

This year, I have been tired. I've been frustrated. I've been pissed. I've been complacent.

I went to Jamaica excited for a break and for the opportunity to be back with people I know. But rejoining friends from the Cedar Valley for a week proved to be more difficult that I ever expected or imagined. The thing that I loved most about Cedar Falls while I was living there was the community that exists and how the value of community is embedded in almost every aspect of life there.

There was the UNI community, the church community, and the Cedar Falls community was pretty tight knit too- I could go almost anywhere in the city and recognize familiar faces.

As I've experienced living in a new place for 9 months now, the biggest thing that I have missed about Cedar Falls has been community, and going to Jamaica with friends from Cedar Falls made me recognize that.

Prior to the trip, I had been frustrated with Mankato. Frustrated that there wasn't a '20 somethings' crowd in the city to hang out with. Frustrated that the community wasn't living up to my expectations of what community should look like.

This past week- I hung out with some friends at a local brewery. We chatted for over an hour about how life was going and how excited we were for the snow to finally melt. As we talked, I opened up more about what I had been feeling- I started being honest about where my heart was at and shared some of my frustrations.

I missed my community.

After sharing where I was at, one of my friends shared with me what they had been working through themselves. They said to me, "Hey, I've been going through the same thing. I've had a hard time watching life continue back home while things are so different here. But Jesus, he's been saying to me, 'hey, that community you miss so much? It's not me. That community is not what you need. That community will help you, but it's not who I am.'

Dang.

Holy dang.

I still believe in the value of community- but after hearing what my friend had to say, I'm recognizing now that I have sought out community here in Mankato as a substitute for God. God created us to be in community- yes. But not as a substitute for who he is- for his love.

Community isn't God. God is God.

I went to Jamaica seeking a break from life in Minnesota- not because I hate it here, but because I have been falsely seeking community instead of seeking God and I walked into the trip believing that the people I went with would quench that thirst.

Every year, the leaders of this trip call it a 'relationtrip'- a trip where relationships are built, both among peers on the trip and those in Jamaica. I've always been a bit skeptical of that name though. Sure, I have always valued the relationships built on the trip, but I thought the funny play on words was just that- something to say to be funny. 

This year though, I experienced the trip in a way that I never have before.

As I hopped off our bus when we arrived the first night, eager to greet some old friends that I hadn't seen in a year, I realized that many of the college students who were experiencing the trip for the first time were still on the bus. College students who were in a completely new environment, nervous to try to communicate with the deaf students.

As I've reflected on that moment, I've come to realize that I've built some incredible relationships with those in Jamaica over the years and it is because my focus hasn't been on what I can do for them, but on building friendships with them that last longer than a one week trip.

Given where I've been at over the past several months, this trip was really good for me. Not in the ways I expected, but because it made me realize that while community is great- the power of community rests in recognizing the power of relationships.

- Dan

there's always tomorrow

"Also, there's something else I need to tell you about this job." The man who I would later call my bosses boss began telling me as I sat nervously in a suit across the table. "The state of Minnesota has decided that the Hall Director position at MNSU is non-exempt so we're offering you this salary with the knowledge that you might have some overtime pay over the course of the year added onto it. However, you'll have to record your hours every two weeks. What are your thoughts?"

What are my thoughts? You're asking my opinion on being told that I can only work 40 hours a week and if I have to work more I get paid more? That sounds FANTASTIC!

"That sounds good by me."

I masked my enthusiasm and excitement for what my future employer was saying. I had spent the day falling in love with my future campus and city and this seemed like the cherry on top of a perfect situation.

What I didn't know, though, was that a lot of time, thought, and preparation had gone into moving the Hall Directors at Minnesota State University, Mankato from salary to hourly. There was some hesitation and doubt from some who did not know how everything would get done with Hall Directors only working 40 hours a week and here I was with absolutely no Residential Life experience to speak of, naively excited about a position I didn't know how to do or what would be expected of me.

For the first 2-3 months of my job, I was being trained in small increments spread out across the months, continuously adding additional tasks and responsibilities to my plate. Here's what I learned about working 40 hours a week during that time.

There's always tomorrow.

I can no longer count on my hands how many times I have said this phrase to whomever is within earshot at the end of the day. I have spent entire days trying to cross things off my to do list with little success because of X, Y, and Z coming up that took my attention away. Being restricted to only putting in 40 hours a week has allowed me the freedom to say this though. I do not fear what might happen if I don't get something done on my to do list by the end of a work day. I leave my office- confident- that it's okay for me to leave things unfinished. Do I eventually accomplish my tasks? Absolutely. But students come first in my office which sometimes means I won't get something done and that's okay, there's always tomorrow.

Culture is everything.

I would not be successful in my position if it weren't for a supervisor who understood and accepted the 'there's always tomorrow' concept. Some weeks, only working 40 hours is tough. My dad taught me at a young age that I need to get my work done before I play. In this job though, work gets left undone and if I didn't have a boss that was completely okay with that, then 40 hours would be extremely difficult. My supervisor encourages me through the busy times and that is the key to my success. Yesterday, I hit 40 hours at 4 p.m. but I knew I needed to take some paperwork to the Residential Life office before my day off today. So on my own time, I took the paperwork to the office and as soon as my supervisor saw me, she (jokingly) told me to go home- I wasn't supposed to be working. We know each other well enough now that she trusts me in managing my schedule and I know when she's joking around, but how cool is it that the culture of the office in which I work allows for this to happen. There aren't a lot of places where a supervisor will tell you to go home.

Empowering my staff.

This change to 40 hours a week for Hall Directors didn't only affect those of us working in the position- the Community Advisors I supervise were incredibly affected as well. I have three returners on my staff who were accustomed to nearly unlimited access to their former supervisor. No matter the hour, their supervisor was just a text message away. With this change, my staff knows that they can text me whenever they need to but I won't respond to work related things until I am working. At the beginning of the year, some CAs would call me when they didn't know exactly what to do when confronting a policy violation- often times with reasonable questions being as new to the role as they were. When I saw their name, I screened their call (they're aware I would do this) and would follow up about the call in the morning. Through this, they learned to troubleshoot and think critically in different situations and solve problems on their own. Now, when they actually do need assistance, they call the Hall Director on Duty to assist with the situation.

Work/life balance is easy.

Since joining the student affairs world, I consistently hear professionals discuss the importance of practicing work/life balance and self-care. Heck, I even wrote a paper about it in graduate school. In November, I attended a conference in Omaha, Nebraska, for housing professionals living and working in the midwest. At the conference, I attended a session on practicing balance in your life and with everything the speaker said, the experiences I have had in my limited time in the field looked completely different from what was being spoken about. In processing through what the speaker was covering, I realized my experience with working only 40 hours a week has allowed me to have a great work/life balance without much headache. With 40 hours a week being a mandated limit from the department, I have found myself fully enjoying my job because I have separation between my job and my personal life. I have had the opportunity to make friends, join a small group, serve in my church, and join a curling league. When my staff put on a program on Wednesday night, I choose to attend the program and then not come into work until 10 a.m. the next morning, and that is simply incredible for balancing my work with the rest of my life.

I fully recognize how incredibly unique this situation is within the higher education field- especially within Residential Life. But only working 40 hours a week has been an incredible blessing.

Do I have to manage my time well? Absolutely.

Do I have to prioritize my tasks and responsibilities on a daily basis? Absolutely.

Do I have to say no to some things? Absolutely.

Do I occasionally drop the ball on a responsibility? Absolutely.

Is it the end of the world when I do though? Absolutely not.

After working a semester in this field as a 40 hour a week employee, I am confident that I am better prepared for future jobs because of the lessons I am learning in balancing all of the responsibilities of my job and accomplishing them in 40 hours.

Mistakes are made at times, but they'd be made if I was working 50-60 hours a week too. I'm writing this blog, not to gloat about my experience and circumstances, but to hopefully shed some light on the issue of work/life balance in Student Affairs. I strongly believe that this change to the Hall Director position at Minnesota State University, Mankato has been a positive thing and hope that this is the beginning of change within the field of higher education. Only working 40 hours a week can seem impossible, but after doing it for a semester- I don't want to turn back.

take up your cross

What the heck does it even mean to take up your cross? I mean seriously, where did that come from?

I have heard that phrase too many times to count. Pastors, friends, strangers in a coffee shop, I have heard all of them tell myself and others around me that we should take up our cross everyday. But every single time I had been told to do this, I found myself wondering what that phrase even meant.

Without context, it is such an unusual phrase.

A couple weeks ago, I was sitting in church and the pastor started talking about taking up your cross- and again, I was perplexed and frustrated that I had not quite grasped what this phrase meant. The pastor was talking about our role in the church and how, as a society, we often look to those who are doing really big things and question what our purpose must be when we aren't doing anything big or spectacular everyday. I mean, there are christians out there who are feeding the hungry or preaching to the lost in far off countries. Yet here we are living in Minnesota, not doing anything ground moving with our lives.

Or are we?

Everyday we wake up and we have the opportunity to make an impact with what we have been given. We can wake up and choose to make a difference in our community. The people around us, they could be just as lost as those in other countries.

While talking about this, the pastor brought up Matthew 10:38. "Whoever does not take up their cross and follow me is not worthy of me."

That dang line. What the heck. I sat in church with an idea of what this meant but not quite a full understanding of it. For too long, my pride kept me from asking what the phrase truly meant. So like any good millennial would do, I pulled out my laptop, googled the phrase, and found that in 3 of the gospels, the same line is recorded.

 

Matthew 16:24- "Then Jesus said to his disciples, 'Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.'"

Mark 8:34- "Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said: 'Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.'"

Luke 9:23- "Then he said to them all: 'Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me.'"

 

Holy dang wow. Think about that for a second- in 3 different accounts of Jesus' life, his disciples felt it was necessary to record this simple phrase from Jesus. Wow.

By no means am I a biblical scholar, I think that is pretty clear by now. But I think that Jesus was trying to tell us that we need to wake up every day and choose to follow him. You don't need to wake up and wonder how you can change the world. Wake up and wonder what you can do with what you have been given.

As I've thought about this over the past couple of weeks, I've been reminded of a verse I read years ago. Ephesians 4:1 says, "As a prisoner for the Lord, then, I urge you to live a life worthy of the calling you have received." This verse has stuck with me because of how the word 'for' is used. As a prisoner FOR the Lord, it says. FOR the lord, we are called to live a life worthy of the calling we've received. Jesus so clearly told his disciples that if anybody wanted to follow him, they needed to take up their cross daily. We can all decipher what living a life worthy of our calling means and we would all come up with a different answer. But what if on the most basic of levels, the calling we've received is to take up our cross every single day and choose to follow Jesus? What if that calling was to choose Jesus daily and make an impact in our own community?

I don't really have a good way to wrap of these thoughts because this isn't something that I have the answer to. I'm wrestling with what this means in my own life and am daily having to remind myself to take up my cross. As I continue to do so, I want to challenge you to do the same. Every single day, choose to live the day for Jesus.

Choose to live your life worthy of the calling that you have received.

I joined a small group

"Welcome to {insert college ministry here}! We want you to get plugged into a community somewhere and what better way than by joining a small group! Small groups are a great way to meet people who are the same age as you. Want to sign up?"

I have heard that spoken in some way shape or form so many times over the past 6 six years. From theRiver, to BASIC, to Chi Alpha and Salt Co., every single college ministry night I attended during my undergrad and graduate years at UNI had an opportunity to get involved in a small group to build community.

I only ever tried it once though. My freshmen year, for one year, I met with a group of guys in the community room at Prairie Lakes Church and talked about life. One of the guys was my roommate, another the first real friend I made at UNI.  It was a great experience that I was sure to tell anybody about when they asked why they should join a small group.

Yet here I am, now a 24 year old college guy who has been a part of different ministries for a while now, and I just joined my second small group- ever.

Several weeks back, a friend was visiting family in Minnesota so I made the drive over to Northfield to spend the weekend with her and her family. On Sunday, we had the opportunity to check out one of the campuses of a new church I had wanted to go to in Mankato, Canvas Church, and wow, it was incredible. we really enjoyed the message and I could tell that they put in a lot of effort into making new and old attendees feel welcome. My first weekend attending in Mankato, I met a young couple who invited me out to an afternoon on a local lake. We grilled out, took the boat out, got stuck in the middle of the lake for a solid 30 minutes, and throughout it all, nothing felt weird.

Everything felt like normal, like home. It was the first time since moving to Mankato that I felt like I was building community.

A week later, I found myself sitting in their home, surrounded by a dozen or so other people whose names I was still uncertain of. Sitting there on the couch, making small talk with the strangers around me- it felt like freshman year again.

I was taken back to my earliest of memories of my time at UNI, when everything was new but I was surrounded by a group of people all excited for the same thing- community. That night, while sitting in my car outside of the couples home, I called the friend who went with me to Canvas in Northfield to tell her about it.

That is why I am writing this today- for those of you who maybe haven't taken the step to jump into a small group yet. Maybe you've been too afraid to. Maybe you've convinced yourself that small groups aren't for you. Or maybe, you've been telling yourself that you are just too busy for a small group- that it would be worth the minimal amounts of time you don't have. For the last five years, that's where I have found myself. I convinced myself that I didn't need a small group, that I was too busy for it. But in hindsight, I'm beginning to realize that I was probably just too afraid of jumping into a new situation and being vulnerable with people I didn't know. If joining a small group is something you haven't done, have never considered, or have actively avoided- I encourage you to reconsider.

I'm glad I did.

the summer

Remember back in elementary school? We spent our summers running around the park playground playing man on the wood chips. We read countless books to get the coveted invite to the summer reading program pool party. A party at the same pool we had season passes to and spent every afternoon getting burnt at.

Then something happened. Middle school rolled around and the playground was quickly replaced with the ball diamonds as we played baseball and softball. We continued to spend so many hours at the pool, but never seemed to get in the water when we went, opting to lounge on the side.

Summertime in high school meant summer jobs at the gas station, grocery store, construction company, and of course, at the pool. We spent the rest of our time cruising around town with our friends and making daily trips to neighboring cities since our town was "too boring."

No matter what though, we always knew what the summer would be like. We knew what to expect as soon as the final bell rang in school and summer began.

No one told us what summer would look like once college came along though. We quickly figured out what we wanted to do though- from heading back home to keep mooching off our parents to starting full time internships to beef up our resumes. While college was a completely new experience for all of us, we were still lucky enough to kind of have an idea of what came after the end of summer- the next year of college.

But then, what about after graduation? What is summer supposed to look like when there isn't anything that just naturally happens next?

That's where I found myself this past May.

There I was, summer after graduation, and I had absolutely NO PLAN for my future.

My lease was up May 31.

My boss at my part time job was unsure if he needed to replace me if I was going to leave.

And literally everybody around me was asking, "What are you doing now that you've graduated?"

Throughout the summer, I found myself really challenged in a way I've never been challenged before. Those of you that know me well enough know that I am a planner through and through. I like to have a game plan going into things and can make adjustments as needed, but really prefer to know what is happening before it does. Being that kind of a person really made this summer difficult for me.

I didn't know where I would be living on June 1 until the week before. I didn't know where I would be living for the month of July until the day before I moved into the new place. Throw on top of that the fact that I was striking out left and right with different job searches and I was feeling pretty discouraged.

I questioned a lot of the decisions I made in graduate school- even going as far as questioning my decision to pursue student affairs altogether. I wondered if the experiences I had had were adequate enough to land myself a job.

Here at the end of the summer- through all of the doubts and questions I had, I have realized how good this summer was for me. In too many situations, I had lived a life free from uncertainty. Every single year, I had a game plan at the end of the school year- I knew what was up next.

This year has been a challenge because of that- I had no clue what this summer would look like.

I didn't know my plan- heck, I didn't have one.

But at the end of summer, when I stopped stressing about it and quit worrying about what was next and embraced the uncertainty of the summer- summer without a plan was really good for me as it forced me out of my comfort zone and helped me prepare for life outside of Cedar Falls.

the move

I'm the first to admit, I didn't want to leave Cedar Falls. I was terrified of leaving everything I knew behind and to restart in a new place.

Cedar Falls was comfortable. Cedar Falls was familiar. Cedar Falls was where I was guaranteed to see old friends who had moved on themselves. 

If you didn't already know, on August 1, I packed up my life into a couple cars and made the move up to Mankato, Minnesota, to work at Minnesota State University. A place where nobody knew who I was nor did the local coffeeshops know my go to order.

I was scared.

Everything happened so fast through the search process that I didn't really have a chance to fully grasp the reality of the move.

Then came moving day. The vehicles were packed, the goodbyes had been said, and I was off. We made the 3 hour drive up to Mankato, arrived, unpacked, went shopping, and began to settle in.

What happened over the next several days blew every expectation I had of what moving would look like out of the water.

On Saturday, I found a local coffee shop tucked away in downtown Mankato. I ordered my cappuccino, sat down at an empty table, and drank it for what felt like an hour. Never had I felt so alone in a place that felt so familiar. After finishing my drink and getting up to leave, a table of four young adults stopped me to ask a question.

I was wearing a shirt friends had sold to fundraise for their missions trip to Haiti and the four at the table wanted to know about it. Through that conversation, we discovered that they were good friends with one of my coworkers at MSU and attended the same church that she did. That then led to the invitation to join them for church on Sunday.

The next day, I walked into Hillside Church with the same uncertainty I had felt all week. I again felt so lost in a place that felt familiar, but Lorenzo, one of the guys who had invited me to church that morning, found me wandering around and walked me over to the welcome center. It was there that he introduced me to a gal named Amy, someone who just so happens to have lived in Cedar Falls for 6 or 7 years!

Amy worked at Prairie Lakes Church while in the Cedar Valley and we discovered that we have quite a few mutual connections in the valley.

Over this past week, I had the opportunity to meet my staff of Community Advisors and learn alongside them about Residential Life at MSU. They are a fantastic bunch of humans who have had a really great time making fun of my Iowa roots, even if everything they think they know about Iowa is wrong. :)

I wanted to write about these first two weeks in Mankato, partially as a life update for those I haven't spoken with yet, but also to talk about leaving Cedar Falls.

I was terrified of moving, yes, but Mankato has quickly shown itself to be a place that I can call home. I didn't want to leave the comfortability of a coffeeshop I had learned to love, but I sit here today writing this post in a shop a couple miles north of Mankato that feels so much like home. And while I continue to seek new encounters to build connections with the 20 somethings of Mankato, I am confident that this place is the right fit for me.

With that, Cedar Falls taught me so much but I am excited to welcome anybody to my new home- Mankato, Minnesota. All are welcome.

- Dan