Happenings

My oh my, friends, how many things have happened since I last wrote!

About a week and a half ago, I made the long commute (and by that I mean drove 10 minutes down the road) to Nashville's Scarritt Bennett Center for a Volunteers Exploring Vocation (VEV) conference put on by the Fund for Theological Education (FTE). Hooray, more acronyms! Anyway, VEV brought together about 50 young people each spending a year serving with one of around 15 different faith-based volunteer organizations. Catholic, Lutheran, Episcopal, Church of the Brethren, a handful of Presbyterians...all sorts of folks were there (all sorts of Christians, that is). I find it amusing the way God works. Off I went blogging about how the problems of the world can be overwhelming (scroll on down to my last post, if you missed it), and then I end up at this conference. As it turns out, one can be quite inspired by three days of nerdy conversations about living in intentional community and how our current cities of residence are handling various issues. In addition to hearing from several Vandy Div School professors (all really great, and I'd be happy to tell you more about their talks if you'd like), we took several field trips. We visited Thistle Farms one morning, and it was a really really great experience. If you haven't heard of them before, check out the link. It's good stuff. We also stopped by Room In the Inn's Campus for Human Development, which I've talked about before, I think. And also also there was our coffee break (yeah...coffee break, on the schedule. Awesome.) at Rocketown, a place for young people to go hang out in a positive environment. So that's the long story short about VEV conference, but I've got plenty more to say if you care to have a longer conversation. :)

The day after the VEV conference ended, I was off to Asheville, NC for PSF's spring break mission trip! Although we only had three students go with us, I think our seven-person group was really fun. It was quite lovely to be back in my home state, and to see mountains on the horizon. We spent our three workdays at A Hope Day Center, which provides a lot of the same services as the Campus for Human Development in Nashville. Showers and laundry, storage, an address at which to receive mail, birth certificate help, and a place to get out of the elements. They also focus a lot on getting people into affordable permanent housing (something of which Asheville apparently does not have nearly enough). It was really interesting to compare the two organizations, and see the differences between homelessness in Nashville and Asheville. We did all sortsa stuff at A Hope...a couple people spent most of their time talking (or perhaps more listening) to folks in the day room, while the rest of us did various cleaning/sorting tasks that the staff just don't have time to do. One of our big accomplishments was cleaning out and organizing a big closet, so A Hope could easily store their donations and have an operable clothing closet for their guests. We also attended an Ash Wednesday service at Haywood Street Congregation, which every Wednesday brings together people from all walks of life over a free meal and worship service. It was a really special experience, and we got the chance to talk to Haywood's pastor after the service. Maybe I'll write more about spring break later, but that's it for now. All in all it was a swell time in a town I was glad to get to know a little better.

Love,
Allison