Monday Conversation

Mondays are usually my favorite day of the week. Mondays in my life with PSF have a set structure: I have a meeting at 10am, lunch with students at 12, and then some "free" time to study, catch up with students, before staff meeting and house night. Today was extra special though.

Last night PSF hosted the homeless ministry of Room In the Inn (RITI). RITI partners with different churches to provide warm meals and a warm place to sleep. Tweleve men spent the night last night with several PSF students and myself at St. Augustine's, the chapel on campus. I really love the interactions with the men--they are jovial, friendly, and are always ready to exchange a little sarcasm/BS with me, which is another one of those Olson family qualities that I possess.

The only real negative that RITI has is that I don't get to enjoy much sleep on the nights PSF hosts it. We went to bed around 10:30pm to wake up around 4:15am to start breakfast. After the kitchen was cleaned, and all my belongings packed up, it was only 6:40. I didn't have another commitment until noon. Now, I certainly could have spent the time working on my sermon for tomorrow night's worship, but that wasn't my immediate thought. Instead, I offered two of the students who had spent the night (and both journeyed to Guatemala) some coffee at Starbucks and some conversation. They indulged me.

What I expected to be an hour long, light conversation ended up being about three hours of a deep and wide conversation. It started with me asking some questions, as Jennifer has shown me, and before I knew it we were in the midst of a conversation about values, morals, personal beliefs, faith, and life. We talked about what we learned in Guatemala, about being vulnerable in a community, about simple living and shared a lot about the issues of life in America and how sometimes those issues cause us to be more gray than black-and-white.

This conversation in and of itself was an enriching experience. It brought a smile to my face as I reflected on a conversation I had last week, when someone asked me if I have an agenda when I met with students over coffee. I was somewhat shocked at that suggestion, and responded saying: "No, I do not enter into a conversation with an agenda. It's the student's space and time and we talk about whatever they need or want to." And that's exactly what happened this morning. Had I had an agenda, I don't know that I would have asked the questions I did. . . questions that brought up issues that the majority of the time I don't even know where I stand. But this morning, early this morning, two students and I gave each other the space and freedom to say whatever needed to be said in a space with no agenda and certainly no pressure to have an answer.