Figuring out a few things, maybe?

Hello dear readers. Thank you for reading - it means a lot to me!

Tomorrow it will have been a month since I got to LVC orientation in St. Paul, and what a full and wonderful month it has been. I am incredibly lucky and think about how blessed I am every day.

I think I might actually be on the way to establishing some kind of a schedule, maybe! St. Luke's pastor takes Monday off and Grace's takes Friday off, so I know that Monday is a better day for me to be at Grace and Friday is a better day for me to be at St. Luke's. I've known that since day 1, but now that I'm starting to understand a little bit better than I did before what the rhythm of a pastor's life is like (and, specifically, I guess, the lives of my two bosses) I know a little better how to plan my time. As I see it now, it feels good to me to know that I'll think about Grace stuff on Monday and St. Luke's stuff on Friday.

But of course...it won't always be as simple as that. Some days it might be better for me to meet with someone from Grace on Friday. In mid-October my other housemate who is working at a church and I will be attending the Nebraska ELCA Synod annual theological conference on a Monday-Wednesday.

So there's schedule, and it's important to remember why. Why am I in Omaha? Why am I doing what I am doing? In the community night that I wrote about earlier, my housemate who led it suggested that we take time to stop on a daily basis and ask ourselves, "What am I doing right now?" This has helped immensely.

As a pastor reminded me, God knows why I'm here, and I do put my trust in that. I do feel driven because in the past week or so I think I have gotten some clues as to at least one reason why, and they are troubling clues, indicative of the power of negative prejudices (racial, classist, age-ist). I definitely don't think I have the solutions - in fact, I would rather not use that word, maybe another one like "actions" or phrase like "next steps" (because I have learned that conflict of all kinds is not something that is ever going to go away). I think we at Grace do have whatever we have, and we at St. Luke's do, and we in Omaha do, and we at Oberlin do, and we in Chevy Chase, MD, do, and...

PS. Two fun facts about Omaha you may not have known:
a) There are hills here! Some parts of neighborhoods have reminded me of San Francisco.
b) The grasshoppers are big and they jump high!! Maybe they do in MD and OH, too, but NE is the first place I've noticed them - their bodies are almost as wide and long as my thumb.