catapult magazine

Has anyone done anything fun or interesting this summer? Like visit a new place, visit an old place, learn something, do something, read something…?

dan,

how on earth do you pay for all that schooling?

First, school is much cheaper in Canada. Second, the immersion program I attended in Victoria was free—part of a federally funded program to encourage bilingualism. Third, I’m going into debt.

I have no idea what dan’s situation is, but I’ll tell you one of American education’s best-kept secrets: GRAD SCHOOL. Most people have no idea what a great deal it is. Usually if you have decent GRE scores and know what you’re talking about, the university will give you a teaching or research assistantship to join their program. Basically, you do grunt work for the university part time, but you in turn get paid to go to school. They usually waive your tuition and give you health insurance on top of a salary that ranges from 10 to 17 grand (as far as the fields I know). It’s modest pay, and they keep you pretty busy, but especially if you’re in the sciences, you’ll get paid enough to live on.

So I don’t know about dan, but I don’t pay for any of my schooling since Dordt. They pay me.

Alas, in the humanities, things are not so easy (after all, what practical use can there be for a poet?)

Sigh.

Ah too true. The pay got cut significantly when I changed over from math into theatre.

(Talking about poets, have you ever read Milan Kundera’s book, “Life Is Elsewhere”? It’s a really interesting novel all about a poet.)

There are exceptions. Some universities offer lots of posh assistanships to graduates students in the humanities. Unfortunately mine isn’t one of them…at least not for MA degrees.

summer for me has mostly consisted of working for a bank, in the beginning, and than painting my parents new house/garage. hmmm… studying for the gre; wish the blasted thing was never invented, somebody said something about decent gre scores earlier- interested in what other consider a decent score. i haven’t been able to get a straight answer out of anybody. oh, i bought some airline tickets to go to england in sept.

Maybe nobody’s telling you because standaards differ. My theatre program couldn’t have cared less about my GRE scores. But my math program probably wanted to see some high math scores and didn’t really care about my analytical or verbal scores. But nobody tells you what the cutoff score is. It depends on the program, the number or applicants that year, blah blah blah. Just do your best. For what it’s worth, the only thing that helped me at all to “study” for it, was learning how to make those charts for the analytical section. As it was, I still didn’t finish that part.

kristinmarie, thanks for asking about my internship. I just saw your post. Sorry for the delayed response.

I think one of the hardest things in ministry is to keep a clean reputation. It’s hard when you get involved with the muck and mire of life. For insteance, one “mistake” I made was to give a single black lady (about 40 yrs old) a ride across Dallas without having another person along. The pastor I was working has seen many pastors and well-intentioned people get sued for sexual harassment because they did not take precautions. Apparently I was a bit naive about the situation.

This same pastor also counsels people. In the process he has to confront sin in their lives. He says its wonderful to see married couples love one another again (they’d been working on hating each other for some time), but because he has exposed their sins and named them to the couple (a crucial part of the healing process) they now hate him and want to get him fired. In the past some have spread rumors and lies about him. Sin is a powerful thing that does get excised without a lot of pain. So you get to see God heal broken lives by Christ’s love but you also get your reputation spoiled.

Is ministry in the trenches worth it? The pastor challenged me to choose now whether to be a traditional pastor or a discipling pastor. It’s not a choice I make easily.

Those are just a couple of the challenges.

What a fun post! I wish I caught it earlier.
Amy and I have had a blast getting used to owning a house. We’ve done a lot of landscaping, painting, and general fix-it-ing. We also took a couple of camping trips, visited Canada twice (I saw my first professional tennis at the Rogers AT&T Cup), hung out with Alex, saw lots of friends and am currently making my way through the old testament. Reading the Bible is so much easier if you start at Joshua. I’ve tried it a few times but never got through numbers and Deuteronomy. I’ll get back to them eventually.