This is Madness!

One week ago today, we at the ministry began what will be called March Madness.  Every March, spring break teams arrive and get exposed to life in an urban area and help out with various parts of what we do.  This year, we have three groups coming; one from Northwestern College in Iowa, one from Clemson, and one from Blackhawk Church in Madison, where I attended for a few years in college.  The team from Iowa arrived, we greeted them at the airport, and I began to wonder what the coming week would entail.  A year ago, we had a group from the same college and two of the team members returned.  It was a fun reunion.  This week, the ten members of the team split up to volunteer at two of the elementary schools in the area during the mornings, then they have discussion during lunch time, then in the afternoon, they split up again and volunteer at the two:fiftytwo after school program, and two others in the area.

What has been different about this spring break experience is that our ministry's director needed to attend a conference in Chicago for most of this week and those responsibilities moved to Marc, and his responsibilities moved to me.  Now, I've done his job before when he's been away so it was nothing new to me; what was new was the fact that I'd be doing it for five straight days and I would need to incorporate the special guests into the program that week.  New tasks included pairing up the students with the adults for homework time (sounds easy but when you need think about which kids shut down when they are with certain adults, it becomes a difficult jigsaw puzzle), having conversations with only the kids that are misbehaving (this can lead to feeling like every day was rough), prepping the announcements for the volunteers and the students that day (if you know me well, you know talking in front of lots of people ain't my thing), and communicating with parents when a child's behavior needs to be communicated, good or bad.

It became very easy for me to wonder if the spring break team could sense my lack of experience with these new tasks.  Heck, maybe they just assumed everything that was happening was how it normally is.  I hope that's not what they though, especially after a day like Thursday.  We had one student yelling, and I mean YELLING at one of the staff members, and she had to be moved to the hallway to calm down.  As I was in the hallway with the other staff member, trying to figure out why all this was happening, it turns out that back in the main area, three more students decided they were going to be difficult.  I had conversations with those three and was actually surprised by how calm I was able to stay.  Where I could have taken this rare crazy day personally, I did not.  Where I could have been worried that our week-long guests were judging our ministry, I was not.  After a long week of craziness, the weekend is here, and although my responsibilities have lessened, I cannot rest.  In the past two days, I've had the chills, a cough, headaches, the sweats, and a terrible night's sleep.  If you could pray for my health, I would be very grateful.  I hope in the coming weeks, I'll have a more detailed account of the spring break teams and all that God has been doing through these experiences.