Feeling at home in Iowa

Iowa! For ten more weeks I will be calling this home! Specifically, my home is with Wilbur and Helen Yoder in Wellman, Iowa. Strangely enough though, they are in DC until the beginning of June. That means I’ve been living on my own and will continue to live on my own for another week! It means in the evening I’m usually bored and lonely. It also means that I have plenty of time to practice playing guitar without caring about sounding awful or being too loud! It’s all good!

I think everyone who would read this knows that I’m interning at West Union Mennonite Church through the Ministry Inquiry Program until the first week of August. What exactly that means I will be doing is something that I don’t even know yet, but I do know some things. For one, I will be mentored by Dave Boshart, the head pastor here. Everyone who knows him says he will be great and I have absolutely no reason to think otherwise! I’m very excited to see what all I can glean from him!

In June I have a lot of things going on. I’ll be making trips to both Minneapolis and Freeman, South Dakota. Minneapolis is a meeting about possibly starting a new Mennonite church up there. My impression is that there won’t be much for me to do, but Dave was invited and he thought it would be good if I went along. The trip to Freeman is for the Central Plains Conference meeting, so that’s a more standard thing that a pastor might do. I will also spend two days at Crooked Creek Christian Camp as the speaker. Then at the very end of the month I will be going to Columbus for Convention.

In my first week, I’ve visited a retirement home, attended an elders meeting, read parts of a few books, and written a paper for Dave, as well as various other smaller things. I’ve been to several people’s homes to see how they are ministering to the community or displaying their faith through art work. There are a lot of people to meet and get to know, but I think I’m off to a decent start.

On Saturday, I didn’t go in to work and instead took a trip in to Iowa City and Coralville. I was all excited for the adventure, but it ended up being pretty lame. For one, the weather was poor. The rain made walking around the Pedestrian Mall difficult. Plus, exploring alone is a lot less fun than I had anticipated. Still, it wasn’t a total waste of a day!

Today was my first Sunday at West Union and Dave had me up in front already reading the scripture passage for his sermon. The church is about 200 people—quite a bit bigger than I’m used to! But I sat up front with Martha Yoder, the associate pastor, so it didn’t even seem like a bigger congregation. After the service I met a few people and then went to the Middler classroom. They’ve been really excited about me coming and have been raising money to help pay for the scholarship that MIP provides. I’m looking forward to working with these kids! Then I went to the Sunday school class with other college age young adults.

I’ll end with two notes involving food. First, even though I’m on my own here at home, I’ve only had to cook for myself once. I’ve had multiple meals with Dave and his wife Shana and multiple meals with Martha and her husband Darvin. Today I was invited over for lunch by another family. Second, I’ve had ice cream five times already. It would seem to me that Iowans really like there ice cream! I don’t mind!