First Day

Yesterday was my first official day of internship, although this week Ed, my supervisor, has to be gone to Portland, OR for a class. This would seem like an odd start to the internship except for the fact that I actually started doing work around the church last week. So in some ways I feel like I am already off and running and I that I have had an opportunity to figure out what I really need to do work-wise before starting the internship side of things.

To be honest I am a little bit nervous. Not for the ministry work itself. Working as a pastor in a church is what I have been training for and working towards for the past four years now. The part that makes me nervous is the internship side of things. I have some many reports to write, journals to do, a daily log I have to keep. I guess I feel nervous that I am going to forget to cross a “T” or dot an “I” and fail my internship.

I am sure that once everything gets rolling I will feel much less nervous about things. I will get into the swing of things and realize that internship work itself is not something gigantic and enormous and impossible. Plus I do not believe that God has brought me this far simply to allow me to fail due to a mistake. I will have to trust God to help me through everything.

Last week I told Ed that I need to read three books during my internship in order to complete book reports. He laughed and said that three books are not enough. He said a good goal is a book a week, but that he would go easy on me and only assign roughly a book every two weeks. I left his office that day with a stake of thirteen books. Some of the books are small, some are bigger. Fortunately he also gave me some materials on speed reading.

It has been dawning on me recently that as much as someone could essentially coast through life getting others to do their work for them and making excuses for the rest that our spiritual lives run completely contrary to that. If I want a better relationship with God then I must act. I can only blame the state of my spirituality on bad sermons and tough circumstances for so long.