It’s pretty much guaranteed that at some point every day God whispers in my ear “look around at the life I have given you, you are so blessed.” Blessed nothin’, I’m spoiled rotten! Everyday I think “how could tomorrow be any better than today?” and everyday God takes that question and laughs and says “you think this is great? Just wait till tomorrow.” Everyday is a lifetime of it’s own….observe:
Typical day at FLI through the eyes of Ashley Padgett:
7:00 AM. Beep! Beep! Beep! Snooze till (hopefully) 7:20ish. Crawl outta bed, throw some waffles in the toaster, commence the morning regime.
7:45 AM. Christine announces she is leaving, if I’m on time I ride and/or drive with her. I make it my goal every morning to be ready when Christine is, since she is our most prompt roommate, because then I know I’m being productive. :-)
8:10 AM. Class begins. We always start the day with some kind of devotion, whether it’s reading and reflecting on a passage from the Bible or talking through a collection of verses.
8:30ish AM. Class officially starts. For the next four hours our professors pour their knowledge on us. I keep forgetting this is school, I get so caught up in the things we are being taught and am so interested and have such a desire to learn it all. Which, by the way, is not a bad thing by any means whatsoever. Anyways, so we have class for these four hours, during which we will learn enough to explode a mind. We also get to have small group discussions with our Life Groups most days. I LOVE these times more than I could tell you, because I LOVE the five other people in my Life Group #3 more than should even be possible! In my group I’ve got Sarah, be ready to vote for her for something huge someday :-) she’s very involved in D.C. and knows here stuff. Kensi, if you think cute, classy, confident and caring, you got Kensi :-) I appreciate Kensi’s focus and being sure to keep things going smoothly. Anne Marie is pretty much amazing. Standing at maybe just over five feet she’s the shortest in our class, she’s got a lot of surprises up her sleeve, when she thinks about something she really thinks about it, and she’s gonna figure out exactly where she stands. Cody is our musical man, he helps lead worship for us every Thursday, he’s also got a lot of silliness too him, but when it’s time to be serious he’s sure to think deeply about what we’re talking bout and give great insight. Chris is the jack-of-all-trades…seriously, he does everything! But most prominent is his art, his photography is beyond professional and creative, and he’s always doodling something. He also brings a lot of outside the box ideas to discussions and, just like everyone else, adds a whole new dynamic to our group.
11:30 AM. Schools out! (well actually it’s a little more like “aww, schools out already!?” collectively we head to the chapelteria for lunch. As we walk in to get our food we greet Pete at the cash register, then we grab a pink lunch tray and decide is we’re gonna have a hot meal, a salad, or a sandwich. After that decision it’s time to pick to have a cakey dessert, cookies, or ice cream (mmhm, they spoil us :-) then we check out with Pete. We tell him our student number and he checks us off the list. I’m convinced Pete was Wooton in another life :-)
Heres where my days differ depending on the day of the week….
Monday: most likely after lunch I’ll end up going home and studying, if it’s sunny out I’ll join the group that’s pretty standardly sitting out on the lawn outside our apartments, pretending to read (and we do get reading done, but it often ends up we just talk a lot). Then Monday nights a group of us head to Ryan and Rachel's (Ryan is one of the staff with FLI and Rachel works with Compassion International) they invite any of us who want to come hang out and study or play games or whatever (one guy painted while he was there). It’s a lot of fun and very chill.
Tuesday: about the same as Mondays, but instead of Ryan and Rachel's we either have dessert night at Kjersten’s (the RD) or was have koinonia dinner at one of the professor’s homes. These dinners are themed dinners planed by the life groups. So far we’ve had a thanksgiving theme, full thanksgiving dinner complete with turkey and green bean casserole (turns out it’s next to impossible to find turkey when it’s not truly thanksgiving time, and as for the green bean casserole, Annalee made that and it was quite her pride and joy :-) we also had a study break hosted by a life group, tourist themed. I found a great outfit at the thrift store and we pretty much just hung out and played games and hoola hooped the night away. Next week is my life groups turn to host the koinonia, and our theme is superheros…so if you know any superhero themed-ish food, lemme know!
Wednesday: after class I have practicum at 1:00. mostly what I’ve been doing is sitting in a cubical and reading, writing and listening. Which has been amazing and I'm so blessed by it all, but I have a hard time sitting for four hours straight in a quiet office not talking to anyone! But it is a lot of fun despite the silence. So far me and Bethany (Bethany is the other intern with me in Odyssey) have been privileged to listen to not yet released episodes, read scripts for the currently being recorded episodes, and write discussion questions for the album and devotionals for the website! Also, the other day we got to sit in on foley, that’s when they go into a room FULL of every surface and sound effect imaginable and they act out the episode and capture the sounds. After that, we still had time to sit in on the podcast recording where (da dada DA!) they were recording the podcasts that WE (me and Bethany) WROTE the SCRIPTS!! I got to see them record all of the script I wrote and they even asked my opinion on how to deliver a line! Haha, I was quite happy, I think I find much more interest in the actual producing side of things.
Thursday: Thursday’s look a lot like Wednesday’s, in the way I have practicum after class. But, after practicum is family dinner, when all the staff and students get together and eat! (and in agreement with the average college student, we learn never to say no to offered food!) after dinner we gather in the Ogden Lounge and have a time of worship. After all that I head to the home of one of the professors. About ten of us girls meet there and the topic is learning about the Proverbs 31 woman and how we can be like her. The thing I love bout this topic is that we are learning how we, as 20-somthings, can aspire to be a woman of virtue without falling into the cookie cutter expectations the proverbs 31 woman is often portrayed as. It’s an amazing group of girls and I love them so much and I love learning about them and this topic all together, and sharing the trials of waking up with the sun and everything else that comes with it.
Friday/Saturday: The weekend!! Adventure beckons! Ok, I have done more adventurous exciting things then ever before on there weekends, they are always packed to exploding! Here’s a list of a few of the things I’ve been doing…
Rock Climbing: reason number one for coming to FLI: work with Odyssey. Reason number two: learn amazing things and meet amazing-er people. Reason number three: climb a real life, legit, God-made ROCK! Check. Check. And, oh! CHECK! A few weeks ago a group of us went out and climbed a rock. We didn’t get to go very high, but it was God made and beautiful and thrilling! :-D
Baseball Game: one of the first weekends here we all went to a Rockies baseball game. It was so much fun and idk if I've ever laughed so much in my life! I don’t think I watched more that three seconds of the game, and I couldn’t tell you where the score was at any point. The only time I watched the screen was when Scott was trying desperately to get the camera’s attention and make it to the big screen (obviously the camera men thought that it wouldn't be fare to put Scott up there though, since it would just be too discouraging to all the rest of the people there since they could never add up to Scott’s amazingness…that’s what we told him anyways :-) we also tried to get the wave started…didn’t go too far. But the stands were full of dancing and candid cameras and laughing where we were.
Dancing – Barn and Swing: we decided to go to this barn dance club place. We drove in (barely survived that!) and when we arrived we 20 or us marched right in and quickly realized that besides us no one there was under 50! Little worries, we joined right in and had a blast and were perhaps a bit noisy, but we danced until they kicked us out (well, actually we just realized that everyone else had left so we figured it was time to skedaddle. The next week though, Dusten and Katie hosted a swing dance in the work out room at Focus, they taught us some moves and we tried to keep up. However the ratio of boy to girl was greatly outweighed by the girls, so we had many a girl/girl partnership, but we had fun anyways. :-)
Dance Partay!: the other night we got home from Family Dinner, and Christine put on a song that was in our heads…before you knew it me, Joy and Christine were dancing the building down to whatever songs we could find with a strong beat…soon there was a knock on our door, “can we come dance with you?” asked Hannah, Ciera and Meghan, they had seen us through our window and couldn’t stay away. So that made six of us dancing like mad women on the third floor. Then we hear another knock on the door, this time it’s two of the guys from down stairs wondering what all the pounding was. They joined in for a few minutes before heading to a movie. The party ended with a ballet interpretive of “Only Hope”.
Climbing a Mountain: get up before sunrise. Go eat doughnuts. Drive to a mountain. Climb it. we hiked up Mount Princeton, it took about all day to do, but it was so worth it, every second. There's so much to say about this trip! Hiking too far and having to turn around, but because of that getting the chance to see a Chateau. Climbing through a foot of snow on the side of a steep mountain. Getting to the top and seeing that GLORY! (p.s. dear people of the world, if you ever have the chance to see this view, please DO NOT give it up, I wish that everyone on earth could have that chance). Booking it back down due to the snow filled clouds at the top. Sweet, refreshing sleep in the car ride home. And it was good.
Compassion International: my roommate, Christine and I went to tour Compassion the other day. It was very interesting, we got to see this insane machine that sorts the checks that come in. we also got to se a few rooms they had set up to show the living conditions of kids in the program, one was a hut like one they would live in, the other was set up to look like what the school building is like. It was so good to be able to see what is happening with that ministry and the way I’m being used to help those kids. It was truly a blessing.
Whit’s End!: after going to Compassion we still had a lot of time left in the day, so we decided to FINALLY get to the one and only Whit’s End! We arrived in style, the only way it’s done…by sliding down the three story slide, A-Bend-A-Go! As we were standing in line on the stairs kids kept cutting in front of us! (I think they didn’t get that two college students would actually want to ride a slide :-) but finally one little boy caught on that this was Christine’s first time down and he started telling her everything about how it’s done “you have to have the socks on your arms and fold your arms like this and you have to put your feet in Michigan” (wait what!? Lol, as I was typing Christine asked how to spell Michigan and I got confused so I had to visualize it so I typed it, then I read her how the sentence read and she begged me to keep it :-) anyways, back to what the kid said…) “put your feet in this sack here’s one for you…” and so on, then when he got on the slide he made SURE we were watching so we’d know exactly how to do it. it was adorable! After the slide we did all the Whit’s End things, playing in the Little Theatre, running up and down the halls exploring every room, traveling to Narnia through the Wardrobe, scavenger hunt, ect. (p.s. apparently there's a geo cache in there under the plane from Last Chance Detectives…we just need to find it!)
Pikes Peak: well, I drove up to the top of Pikes Peak in my faithful Ruby (my car) and survived! We packed the car with five or us girls and took off. At the beginning of the road the woman at the toll booth told us it was snowman day or something, and as an extra challenge we could build a small snow man and prop him on our windshield and see how long he’ll stay up there on the drive down. We had also heard roomers that the doughnuts the make up there are special because of the altitude and if you bring it down the mountain it will deflate. So we had our challenges for coming down. Just before we left we built Clarence, a sweet little innocent snowman about a foot tall and laid him on our windshield, we also got a doughnut, named Dunkin, and placed him on the dashboard. Well, Dunkin never deflated and Clarence was destroyed by some passing kids when we stopped halfway down, so we had to build George for the rest of the ride, and he survived all the way down the mountain and halfway home.
Sunday: I’ve been going to different churches every week, most of them have been so big I just feel overwhelmed, personally, I don’t like churches that are so big that no one knows anyone and you could go for weeks before anyone so much as greets you, and there's more lights and bling then not. But, my roommates found one they like and I’ve been going to that one with them for now, it’s still too big for me, but it’s smaller then most of the others and the music is good (though a bit loud for me sometimes) and the preaching is legit.
So, that is my week in a nutshell (I know, if THAT’S a nutshell imagine what the whole nut TREE looks like it (except peanuts, for as my roommate Emily just informed me they grow underground) all I can say is, I love life and life is good!
P.S. so I also wanted to talk about my Strengths, we took a test called StrengthFinders and it identified our top five out of thirty-four…mine are:
Adaptability:
People who are especially talented in the Adaptability theme prefer to “go with the flow.” They tend to be “now” people who take things as they come and discover the future one day at a time.
Ideation:
People who are especially talented in the Ideation theme are fascinated by ideas. They are able to find connections between seemingly disparate phenomena.
Strategic:
People who are especially talented in the Strategic theme create alternative ways to proceed. Faced with any given scenario, they can quickly spot the relevant patterns and issues.
Woo:
People who are especially talented in the Woo theme love the challenge of meeting new people and winning them over. They derive satisfaction from breaking the ice and making a connection with another person. (or as I like to call it: Instant friendship…and apparently people with Woo get a lot of free stuff??)
Empathy:
People who are especially talented in the Empathy theme can sense the feelings of other people by imagining themselves in others’ lives or others’ situations. (or in other words “I know how you felt when that hammer hit your thumb because I’ve also had a hammer hit my thumb…I feel. Empathy. For. You…)
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