Scrubbing toilets and mopping hallways, cleaning kitchens and vacuuming carpets while everyone, well most everyone, sleeps soundly has taken me a little bit to get used to, but I’ve come to enjoy it.  I find myself free during the day when everyone else is doing their work and free during the night in the stillness and the quiet as I myself work.  At first I felt jet-lagged and lonely, but now I feel like I’ve adjusted to my own personal time zone, and have acquainted myself with those around me who’ve graciously included me in their conversations during the waking hours and dinner tables at meal times.  I feel less lonely than I did during the school year and  more a part of a community.  I still have fought myself over going to church, but I’ve made a goal to commit to one over the summer.  Campus is peaceful now and there isn’t many people here.  That will change with the coming of conferences and church groups very soon.  Now is the time in between graduation when the seniors became alumni and everyone was buzzing about carrying boxes and mini-refrigerators, packing over stuffed cars and the summer conferences.  My supervisors are nice to me and so are my coworkers.  I’m still getting to know everyone and still coming up with some sort of routine for these odd hours, but it is coming along very nicely.  I am happy with how my first semester back in college has gone for the most part.  It took me a while to get use to the deadlines and the regular studying once again, but I did okay.  I know I need to be a little bit more disciplined for the next semester and am praying that I would be able to pull through with it.  I want to go to some place like Harvard for graduate school.  Every time I think of it, it makes me blush a little.  “What an audacious goal for someone who works as a summertime janitor and hasn’t done much to save the world with his life.”  I think to myself in protest.  But the thought or hope or whatever you want to call it is still there.  There is much doubt in my mind that I could get into a place like Harvard considering my experience with my previous college.  I pray to God about it and I don’t think I have any answers.  The only conclusion that I have is hard work, but I realize that hard work has it’s limits.  I worked hard at my previous college but didn’t get anywhere.  I think now is the time for creativity in the spirit of G. K. Chesterton and less of hard work although there will be plenty of it.  Now is the time for enjoyment and curiosity and journeying a little bit further than I would normally go.  Now is the time not to be embarrassed too much but to embrace diversity and uniqueness.  Now is the time of poetry and music and adventure.  Going to a place like Harvard, ironically, fills my mind as I scrub the public toilets and mop the hallways, but I dare not speak of it.  It is my greatest secrete and one of my greatest motivations, but I will try not to idolize it.  And realize that with God’s help I will be able to flourish wherever I go, whatever I do, for His yoke is light.  Henri Nouwen taught at Harvard and left to take care of the people at L’arche in Canada.  I am glad he did that, and I think about him as I journey through college.  He used words like “downward mobility” to describe the path of Jesus.  I think if I want to pursue theology and ministry, downward mobility and incarnational will be words that I will indwell, even if it means being an ordinary person.  I have already discovered in my late night conversations with my co-workers that I have much to learn from those around me, be they six years younger and rising sophmores in college or twenty years older and have worked cleaning and scrubbing all their life.  I can not help to think that someway somehow God cares for this odd hour group of people at the small rural college called Messiah in central Pennsylvania and that He cares for what we do and cares about our late night conversations and the way we learn from one another.

I pray that you will know God’s love for you today.