Wow. January was quite the month y’all. 2023 is starting off strong. The amount of information I received and digested this month from retreats, new classes, roundtables, and personal life reflection reached a new all-time high, and my mind and body are feeling full. This month was a deep cutting examination into who I am, what am I doing, and where am I going.

To start it all off, we began the month with our mid-year retreat back at the wonderful Ashley’s lake house that I am so grateful we get to enjoy. We spent the week diving into calling and vocation through the lenses of both biblical understanding on the broad topic and personal application based on a series of assessments we all took over break. These assessments taught us things like what type of learner we are (spatial, visual, auditory), how we process things, what our top motivations are, and our emotional-IQ, all very fascinating and insightful. As part of this retreat we also got to each sit down with our retreat speaker Bruce and unpack all this information and what it meant in regards to the industry we want to go into and the job we are looking to have. For me, Bruce and I spent a lot of our time discussing the discernment process of deciding if it is worth it to chase after a “dream job” that might take you away from the place you want to be, or if it is worth it to prioritize the community and place you feel is the best fit even if the job there is unknown or less than ideal. I left this retreat feeling like I had lots of new language to explain how I think and the type of learner and worker I am, as well as having a better sense of how my motivations align with the career I am aiming for. But I also left carrying the weight of unknown as to what specific job all that knowledge will drive me towards. 

Amidst my pondering of all this, this month I got the pleasure of going to Booyah Brr with Apostles’ Student Ministry. BOOYAH. You may be asking, what in the world is Booyah Brr? Well, Ian, Mallory, Hayes, and I packed up three cars and one 15-passenger van and drove 3 hours through the middle of nowhere to Scottsville, Virginia for a wild and wonderful weekend of Anglican church camp. It was quite the adventure, we played pac man in a muddy maze in cloudy, 40-degree weather, karaoked to Taylor Swift in front of the whole camp, slept in bunk beds stacked three high with no safe way to climb up them, and learned that none of the students have noticed any of the rebranding efforts that have gone on in our church over the last couple of months (essentially my entire job, so that was humbling). But all in all it really was a fun weekend of super sweet bonding with the students that I thoroughly enjoyed. Camp life will forever and always hold a special place in my heart.

Now back to the deep soul searching. This month we began a whole new set of classes, including New Testament, Christ in Culture, and an Inductive Bible Study on the Sermon on the Mount, all fantastic so far. Our Christ is Culture class is centered around discussion on the book How (not) To Be Secular by James Smith, which asks the questions of how society has moved from a time when it was almost impossible 500 years ago to deny the divine within society to our modern era where it is now almost impossible to believe in the Christian faith. I am really excited for our conversation in this class of how to engage with nonbelievers in the discourse of life’s meaning and purpose and thinking about what aspects from our modern culture can we celebrate in terms of advancement and discuss where has society gone too far to the point where the need and understanding of God is hard to see. This is a topic I really relate to as I often find myself sifting through the culture of our generation to figure out where I align with the ideas and beliefs swirling around me and where I am willing to draw lines based on the biblical truth I ground my life in. 

On top of that, over break we all interviewed our family members to collect information to help us write our genogram papers for our family systems class. We also spent time with our teacher mapping out the discoveries we made in those interviews looking for patterns between generations that may exist. It has been really cool to see how the lives of my great grandparents and parents have translated down into the values and practices of my own upbringing. It has also made me think a lot about the relationships I have with my family members and given me the desire for further closeness between us as I continue into adulthood. 

Like I said, this month held a lot of deep or “juicy” content. Sorry if it wasn’t the fun, gossip “juiciness” you may have hoped for. And I didn’t even get into the John Richmond retreat which was also awesome, he gave us a “framework for a well-lived life” through his 10 family rules and a conversation on successful spousal selection (now that was juicy). But I bet you’ll hear more about that through some other fellows blogs. Anyway, that’s all for now. January kick started the year with quite the punch!! I feel like I’m really beginning to hit my stride here in Raleigh and continually so grateful to be here, so thankful for and obsessed with my fellow fellows, and amazed and in awe of our courageous, beautiful, and wonderful director Ashley.

-Linsey

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