want some wheatgrass?

Hello family and friends!

Well, I hear you all (in Indiana at least) had a hotter day yesterday than we did! I think the weather has been one of my favorite things about being out here. It's been consistently perfect... none of those Indiana "high of 100, low of 50, chance of rain, chance of snow, good luck figuring out how to dress for the day" kind of forecasts. Actually it was funny because on Sunday it was a little more chilly here than usual. I of course didn't think anything of it and went to church wearing a sundress, but was totally comfortable. When I got there I had at least 3 people make comments to me along the lines of "Aww.. you must have forgotten your sweater today..." or "Aren't you freezing???"

The past couple nights I've been able to spend with Kelli and the gang. Last night we went over to one of the guys' house. His name is Brad and he was an intern last summer with them and they all go to APU together. So it was us three, Matt (another intern) and then two of their other friends. We made chocolate covered gummy bears (which taste better than you'd imagine), played some board games and card games, and enjoyed some hot tub and pool time. They like to play all of these trivia and word games which I always lose at and they make me feel very uneducated, but maybe I'll come back smarter! haha

Today at the office is was just one meeting after the next! We had our intern meeting in the morning. For our intern meetings we have a speaker come in to share with us. Today they brought in a pastor from the church. He talked with us and did some exercises to kind of give clarity to who we are as individuals in Christ and figuring out where our strengths and passions meet. There were four questions that he walked us through. 1)What do I love doing? 2)Who do I love impacting? 3)What needs do I love meeting? 4)How do I love impacting them? We had two volunteers that he talked through the questions with and then together they choose two words that more or less give clarity to their calling. He described the words as being a short phrase to where they should ignite your soul enough to get a conversation going with someone and allow for you to paint a picture of what God is doing through your life. To give an example, my friend Kelli was one of the volunteers who went today and her two words were "Restore connections." The other guy who went came out with the phrase "Inspire hope." I thought it was a great reflective exercise and our speaker invited us all to send him an email if we wanted to meet him later and go through it ourselves. I may just do that. If I do, I'll be sure to let you know what my two words are :)

My next meeting today was a lunch date with Kelli. It was nice being able to get to talk to her one-on-one. She's just great :)

Third meeting was staff meeting. We were assigned to new staff groups today which are just groups of about 6 to 8 people with staff and interns from all different departments within the church. Today our group leader read through a devotional on leadership and then we went around and shared praises and prayer requests. Side note: people keep asking me where I'm staying. When I tell them I'm living in a hotel they get really sad for me and all start questioning why the church wasn't able to provide me some form of housing. Great question haha. But I assure them all that it's not bad.

My final meeting of the day was interesting.. haha. A guy from the web department stopped into our office area and announced for all of us to go to the creative room because "It's time to have some fun." I had no idea what to expect... I thought maybe it was someone's birthday and we were going to have cupcakes? Wrong. They had these tiny little cups filled with wheatgrass, and also cups filled with apple juice. There were probably 20 of us in there and they made us all go around the table and take a drink of the wheatgrass and then follow it up with a drink of the apple juice.

...It tastes just as bad as it looks. But, they were right.. it was fun :)