a YAV at the NYG in NOLA

Every three years the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod hosts a National Youth Gathering (NYG) where, you guessed it, youth from all over the nation gather together.  I was lucky enough to attend the gatherings in Orlando in 2004 and 2007.  This year it was in New Orleans (NOLA) and my role was a little bit different than in the past.  Instead of participating this year, I had the opportunity to serve as a Young Adult Volunteer (YAV, pronounced like "yam" but with a "v") and quite literally be the hands and feet of the gathering and, more importantly, of Christ.

What does this mean?

A. It means I got to wear the same orange shirt every day for a week.  One night they made a joke about the stench around NOLA and blamed it on Orange Nation (the YAVs) and Yellow Nation because they were both only given a single shirt for the entire Gathering.  They joke continued to say a portion of that night's offering was going to buying air fresheners for us to wear around our necks.  Yummy.  It also means I got a green backpack that, combined with the shirt, made us all look like pumpkins.  And I got a gold VIP bracelet that let me go just about anywhere I wanted (or needed) to go.

Read: Long days, short nights, and sore feet.

B. At 7am every morning I was headed into the community to serve and help rebuild in the wake of Katrina.  Vegetation removal, landscaping development, etc.  They let me be in charge of a bus.  One day I almost left a group in the bayou.  The next day a different group left me at the woods.  The first day I was actually able to give away my Bible to a New Orleanian!

Read: Physically exhausting; spiritually exhilarating.

C. At 7pm, I was wearing the same orange shirt with a pretty yellow vest as I tried to make sure no one was trampled as they invaded the Superdome.  Basically that meant I was the first one trampled.  I'm 5'8" and 120 lbs.  There's not much I can do to slow down 25,000 excited teens except to be a speed bump.  I don't know if you're familiar with the Superdome, but what is considered the first floor is filled with dangerous catwalks that I had to stand next to for five hours every day.  Sure, there's a railing but it's was almost exactly at the top of my hips.  Since my body naturally bends there, it would not have been hard to push me to a nice soft landing on concrete a floor below.  I will admit, there were some people I would have preferred they knocked me to my death than forced me to deal with them...
Read: Crowd control = Fear.  Lotta fear.  It is only by the grace of God that I survived.

Welcome to the National Youth Gathering, the place where all of those rules your mother taught you do not apply. Talking to strangers is encouraged (hugs welcome). Running, dancing, and jumping in the concourse are totally acceptable. Oh, and no indoor voices. Buckle up and get ready for a wild ride.
I'll be honest, it's hard to be friendly, fun, and flexible when you're working eleven to twelve hours a day and sleeping five to six hours a night.  It's hard to be spiritually fed while you're worried about making sure you're physically fed.  However, hard is not synonymous with impossible.

Even though the trip was last week, free time was sparse.  Instead of updating you while I was there, I'll use the next week or so to tell some of the great stories from my trip to New Orleans.
<>< Katie

See the blue; be the blue

My summer days have been pretty much the same: check blogger for updates, facebook, read blogs, check blogger for updates, write a new blog, read a chapter, work on novel (50,000 words!), check blogger for updates, read a chapter, work on novel, check blogger for updates...

When I finally tear myself away from the computer, I head to the basement to work on my scrapbook.  Directly above my workstation is a window that leads to a hole in our backyard.  When we first punched holes in the walls to add the windows, we put flowers in the terraced dug-out because they were pretty.  Well, the years have gone by and so have the flowers.

The other day I was banished to the basement (tornado warning?).  After cranking out a few pages, I looked up and saw this:

That's the best photo I could get without climbing on the counter and sitting in the window well in a "super safe way," sorry.  There is one small clump of blue flowers in a huge sea of green.  I looked at those blue flowers and smiled.

That's how we're supposed to be: one blue flower in a sea of green.  We're supposed to stand out in the crowd.  Stand strong for Christ, even when we're alone.  Daily show His grace, mercy, joy, and compassion even when it isn't easy.  We're supposed to be the blue.

A couple of hours later, I was still thinking about this God moment when I remembered the title of disc two in my car: See the Blue by Peder Eide.

The back of the CD case says,

If you look around yourself right now - even as you read this- and look for the color blue, you will most likely find many things that are blue.  The color stands out when you look for it.  It has always been there, but it's when you look for it that you find it!  The same goes for God's presence, God's fingerprint, God's grace, and God's still small voice.  It's always there, but often we don't notice it, hear it, or see it until we look for it."

Do you see the blue?  Can you be the blue?

<>< Katie

Chula Schwann's New Do

Have you met my skeleton?

Some people have skeletons IN their closet… I have a skeleton ON my closet. This was not always the case. Last year around Halloween the cleaning woman in our dorm decorated for the holiday. This included putting a life-size green skeleton on the wall right outside my dorm door. Every time I walked around in my room he’d catch my eye, and I always thought there was someone outside my door. This actually creeped me out. I figured I’d just move him down the hall a little bit further, and he wouldn’t bother me anymore. Maybe I’d give him a name, too, because that’s a nice thing to do for a skeleton.

Well, I was telling my friend Laura about him, and she had another idea. At 3am on a Friday night, Laura and I decided this poor green skeleton needed a makeover. I was in a Human Biology core requirement at the time, and we’ just finished learning the bones of the body. What better way to study than to label the bones on the skeleton in the hallway? Well, when we’d finished my skeleton we moved on to the two other skeleton’s in the building, repositioning them to live directly outside of Laura’s dorm and a mutual friend’s dorm.

Of course, these skeletons needed names (as did the mice living in their ribs and feet). I don’t remember were “Chula” came from, but “Schwann” was from the Schwann cells of the Peripheral Nervous System (what we were presently studying in my biology class). We toyed with names like, “Glial”, “Axon”, “Dendrite”, too, but “Schwann” seemed to be the strongest. Yes, Laura and I get mega-nerd points. I'd like to add that Laura waned to label the muscles on the fully-clothed witch, but I felt that was a little over-kill. Either way, our adoptive father is an anatomy professor (but not my prof) and was incredibly proud of us for our hard work.

The cleaning woman wasn’t quite as proud. In fact, she was upset that we moved the skeletons. Lucky for us, we had earned her forgiveness before it was time to de-decorate. I think it had something to do with her perception of us being nursing majors and she thought it was just part of the gig in being a nursing major. Boy did we have her fooled! Laura and I are religion and writing majors… not even close to nursing. Independently of each other, Laura and I both asked her if we could keep the skeletons. The cleaning woman forgave us and gave us the skeletons. Somehow Laura got the purple one while I got the green one. We used Sharpie to re-label the bones on the third skeleton, Jobab Schwann, and mailed it to our friend Natalie who was studying for the MCAT.

For the remainder of the year, Chula Schwann hung on my wall and Toby Schwann (Laura’s purple skeleton) hung on her wall. Well, that is until Toby imploded and then he lay collapsed on top of Laura’s microwave. Like Yossarian in Catch-22, I had a dead man in my room. Unlike Yossarian’s dead man, Mudd, my deadman didn’t have any stuff. In fact, Chula learned to be a pretty good dancer as we’d periodically rearrange his appendages throughout the year.

At the end of the year, I brought Chula home with me (amputating his leg in the process), and I couldn’t figure out what to do with him. I wasn’t quite ready to part with my nerdiness, so I did the only logical thing I could think of to do: I hung him up. Of course, the only space in my room open enough to hang a paper skeleton is on the closet door. This is how I have a skeleton ON my closet rather than IN it.

Today I gave Chula Schwann a new do. No clothes for the skeleton, nor did I remove the notecards differentiating between his mandible and maxilla (which I might have finally learned, thank you).

The newest book I'm reading is called A Novel Idea and each chapter is written by a different published author in the Christian world. The chapter I just read is by Angela Hunt and it's entitled "The Plot Skeleton." Like the title suggests, she talks about plot in terms of a skeleton. Since I'm a visual learner, I figured I should draw this out, and what better specimen than the skeleton on my closet?

I, of course, can't take a picture of Chula in his present condition because that would give away too many details that I don't want to reveal, but I can give you a quick summary of Hunt's chapter.

First the skull, the protagonist. This protagonist has two problems, also known as eye sockets. One is a clearly defined, known problem while the other is more hidden. Head down (pun intended) to the cervical vetebrae, or neck, where the protagonist experiences some sort of problem further introducing the reader to the character and exposing coping mechanisms. This isn't the catastrophe, that's waiting somewhere around the thoracic vertebrae (middle of the back, for those of you who don't have skeletons at your disposal). Throw in at least three ribs of complications and muscle in between as resolution. Chula doesn't have any muscles between his ribs, but he does have a mouse in there, so we had to improvise. Move on to the femur, considered to be the bleakest moment where Hunt forbids miracle fixes to the protagonist's problems. Move past the knee and you hit two helpful parts: the fibula and the tibia. One is an external force that pushes and encourages the protagonist to keep going; the other is an internal decision the protagonist makes thus solving the previously hidden problem and learning a lesson. Hit the foot and it's time to wrap it up. The end.

Here's my problem, this skeleton Hunt has created is a double-arm amputee, but I amputated Chula's leg, remember? Well, just like reconnecting Chula's leg, I'm entertaining the idea of making the arms subplots involving other characters that interact with the protagonist. Not quite sure yet, and I'd love your opinion.

As always, thanks for reading!

<>< Katie

I think we're gonna die!

I know, two blogs in one day WHAT? Well, you see, today is a very monumental day in our house, and I was not aware of it until five minutes ago.

In early July, my mom started a new diet that involves controlling what she's eating, how much she's eating, and when she's eating it. It's caused some major changes in our house. For example, it's 7:30pm, and we haven't eaten dinner yet because she can't eat for another 30 minutes. We're also had some pretty interesting food around here lately. The muffins aren't too bad once you get over the burnt-brown coloring, the crunchiness from carrot chunks, and fresh pineapple mush in them. We affectionately call her bread "Wood Chip Bread" because it seriously looks like mulch. Needless to say, I'm pretty excited to return to my college-diet of daily pizza.

My dad is taking another stand and attempting to save the environment. That's not to say he won't blow four cans of Raid in five minutes. Rather he's avoiding watering the grass and turning on the air conditioning. As a result, it's almost August and we haven't turned our air conditioner on all summer. It's ok because all of us (except Dad... how ironic is that?) like the breeze from having the windows open. I leave for school in two weeks and today, for the first day all summer, we turned on our sprinklers.

Mom's going organic.
Dad's going green.
We're going to die!

In Christ,
<><>

"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." Genesis 1:1