My Life in Fort Wayne - Thursdays

It's kind of hard to believe, but I've already lived in Fort Wayne for 6 whole months. As with living anywhere else, I've developed a certain rhythm of life, and because most of you have no idea what I actually do in Fort Wayne, I thought it would be a good idea to do some short posts of what I actually do every day. So every day this week, I'm going to be posting a short blurb of what that day normally looks like.

Thursday - Small Group Day

Sorry for posting this late. As I'll describe below, Thursdays are often my absolutely craziest days. I'm going to do this post a little bit differently - Because this post is going to revolve around the small group, I'm going to give an overview of the small group here and the details will come later. As you can see, Thursday nights are small group nights, and we try to rotate around different people's homes, so it's not too much of a burden on anyone to host every week, which also includes feeding everyone. However, the "default" location is still my apartment, and I would say that we've met in my apartment for around half of our meetings. Our group is pretty small, with around 12 total members, and we've had meetings with as few as 4 people and as many as 10 people.

8:00pm - 5:00pm - Work

5:0pm - 6:00pm - Cook like a madman. Smoke up the apartment so much that my eyes are watering and I can barely breathe. Open up the door and windows to try and get rid of the smoke before people arrive. Frantically clean up the living room.

Dinner is basically the responsibility of whoever is hosting that week. Small group originally was only at my apartment, but it's been awesome seeing everyone take ownership of the group, and we've been at a lot of different homes, making it not so stressful on me. But around every other week, including yesterday, it's up to me to host. Dinner starts at 6, which means I need to leave work earlier than normal, to rush home and cook whatever I plan on making. Not only do I need to cook, I need to clean up my super messy apartment and throw everything into my room. Sometimes, when I'm feeling especially hospitable, I even do a quick vacuum of the living room area.

Anyways, cooking for the group has been super fun. I try to cook decent food instead of the peasant food that I normally eat. If you know me in my college days, you may know that I hated using recipes, because I saw it as week and unadventurous, which lead to my very well-known culinary disasters. However, I've found out recently just how fun and satisfying cooking from a recipe can be. I still get to make my own modifications and stuff if I so choose, but recipes give me a general baseline to follow. Also, it helps me to make food that is actually edible for other people to enjoy. I've had a lot of fun making food for the group. So far, I've made meatloaf, spaghetti and meatballs (homemade meatballs though!), steak/chicken tacos (with homemade pico de gallo!), and yesterday I made wings! So many exclamation points! But yeah. I like cooking.

Rice Krispie Treats!

Half-eaten meatloaf!

Guacamole!

Nothing really out of the ordinary here. We just grab food, sit around, eat, and talk. I guess I can talk a little bit about the group. We range in age from 20-30, with must of us being between 20 and 25. We have a total of 4 girls, 3 of which are nurses. The girls tend to rotate weeks, so we average probably two girls a week. Other than me, the 30-year old lawyer is the only one not from the area, and only one other guy (the church's youth pastor) besides us two has attended a "big-name", higher-tier university (he went to Purdue). Around half of our group was home-schooled growing up. Everyone but me is white. Everyone but me and the lawyer still lives with their parents/family. As you can tell, the culture is just very different. Life is extremely family-oriented, and most of them, especially those that haven't ever left home, haven't experienced any real sort of peer small group community that we experience in college ministries.

Something interesting is that even before I arrived, the people in the group for the most part didn't really know each other well. This made it pretty easy fitting in, simply because they didn't know each other much better than I knew them. As mentioned before, their idea of community is pretty different from what I think of it as. And the church seems pretty disjointed in this sense as well.

7:15pm - 7:45pm - Play a game or sing some songs

I really love playing games. Most of you know that. Unfortunately, because a bunch of the members in our group either need to get up really early for a weird shift at the hospital or to get up to work the next day, we needed to cut our meetings a little shorter, so we haven't gotten real opportunities to play games recently. Which makes me sad. Because I think games are an awesome way to get to know each other and just to make people comfortable with each other.

7:45pm - 9:00pm - Study the book of Mark

So after a few weeks of meeting and derping around during our meetings, it was decided that we should actually do a set Bible study. I forget how exactly we got to this point, but we all agreed to studying Mark together. Just like the hosting, we try to rotate leaders every week to reduce the singular burden of leading. Also, it's nice to be able to experience the leadership of different people every week instead of being subjected to one style every week. Something interesting that happened when we were talking about rotating leaders is that one of the girls piped up and said that she prefers that only guys lead, because it's better that way and we get practice for marriage and all that. Talk about conservative. So yeah. It's been all dudes leading.

I've gotten to lead a few times, and I chose to lead inductively. Believe it or not, before this small group, I've never actually lead an inductive Bible study before. I never actually got a chance to do it at any point in my 4.5 years in AIV. Maybe it's because I've always been considered for Core and not for small group leaders. Who knows. But anyways, no one else in the group has done inductive before I introduced it to them, which makes things doubly interesting. After leading it for the first time, I have a whole new level of respect for my past (and the current) AIV small group leaders. Man! Leading inductive is hard! It's much more difficult than the free-for-all, everyone-wants-to-contribute idea of inductive Bible study that I had envisioned. So to all my previous small group leaders, thanks! It was much harder than I had imagined. Also, I also feel the difficulty of many people not wanting to touch their papers or mark anything up, and with them looking at you as if you were stupid for underlining so many things. So yeah. It's been a fun experience.

My Life in Fort Wayne - Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays