Service Adventure - J O H N S T O W N

Over the past five months I've been on a journey of uncovering truths hidden too well by familiarity. Everyday, in conversations and observations, I understand a little more of God's great world like light piercing through the cracks around my bedroom door, slowly pushing around the dark edges. I see a little more everyday and realize how little I have ever known. In fact, I often joke that my official motto has become "I KNOW NOTHING". But I'm learning, and as I pioneer through this great journey, I've been writing about these truths in my journal and here, crystallizing the thoughts into words and structure. Often after I've set an idea into words, I stop thinking about it; I then move from idea to idea, pulling in bits from the last to make sense of the new, yet there is one idea that seems to keep resurfacing.  This thought began very early, back to the first day I came to Service Adventure. My family was dropping me off at my new home, and as we dr...

Today was a day of great fluidity. The time passed by without the hours marked by beginnings and ends of assignments or deadlines. It was a Saturday in its freest form, a day that remains untamed by schedule or expectation. I moved through this eddying expanse of free time at my own pace - however fast I'm motivated to be. I woke when my body could sleep no more, I ate when I was hungry. My attention slipped and then caught again on the tasks I set in my path much like our van tires did on the black ice we encountered driving to work this week. In the back of my mind there's an itch to do something grand and wonderful with this blessed time, but really there's nothing I'd rather be occupied with than sitting here on my couch, my patient journal beside me waiting for me to continue my entries where I left off two weeks ago, a candle burning, a half full mug of black tea on the side table along with a to do list half crossed off with things I should have done last week, a...

After traveling home over our Service Adventure Christmas break, I've been reflecting over different aspects of what I consider "home". As anytime when difference is re-exposed, contrasts naturally pop out teaching us lessons that we previously couldn't have seen. Coming home after acclimating to Johnstown and the Service Adventure program for several months became an excellent example. View from the Hawksbill Gap hike, the sunset behind us Limitless Though I am young, every once and awhile I pause and catch the sense of my own death. I hear of people dying, I feel my body wear, or I reflect on how quickly even these few 18 years have passed by and my inability to stop them as they continue slipping out of my hands. My mind can hardly grasp that I will someday cease to exist. How can I imagine the hardships in my life to come, the slow decaying of this now resilient body, and then the tipping off of reality into the grayness of eternity and the unknown? In t...