This summer, Shoal Creek Community Church (SCCC) is kicking off the 12th annual Shoal Creek Internship a.k.a. The Foundry. This internship is being run by a good buddy of mine, Justin Talley, a staff member of SCCC in charge of student ministries for 6th-12th graders.
The Foundry is a 10-week experience that I had the pleasure of participating in during the summers of '06, '07 (as a team leader), and in '09 (as the internship director). The internship was one of the most impacting things I've done with my life and I still see the aftershocks of my times as an intern now. So I wanted to give you 5 reasons that I think you should be a Shoal Creek Intern this summer.
You'll learn to stop pretending to like everybody.
I think we've been brought up to believe that the job of a Christian is to get along with everybody at all times. During my first summer as an intern, there were 20 of us. 10 girls in a separate carriage house and 10 of us guys in a basement. You can't live with 10 guys sharing 1 bathroom and get along all of the time. And not to be a chauvinist, but I don't think 2 girls can share a bathroom, let alone 10. And not just that, but people are all different. Live with 19 other uniquely-designed personalities on a daily basis for 10 weeks and you'll find it hard to fake being nice too. But I learned during the internship that God is less concerned with us getting long and more concerned with us seeing each other as His loved child.
You'll learn to move when you don't know which direction to go.
When I was an intern, I was on a team of 6 interns that ran the elementary ministry for a summer. We didn't really prepare that well. We weren't told to design 10 weeks of ministry 6 months in advance. We played it out week to week and had to learn to improvise. For somebody like me who was used to staying in my shell, that meant getting out of myself and calling every parent I could find until I found a place for a pool party for the kids or acting like a complete fool during the Sunday morning children's skits.
Also, I had to learn to move when there was friction between another intern and myself. I didn't know what was the right thing to do, but I had to learn to trust God and move despite not having a clear roadmap.
You'll learn the power of a good meal.
As interns, we generally ate every meal together. Breakfast in the kitchen in the attic of the building, lunches at the homes of SCCC members who volunteered to feed us, late-night bbq's and Taco Bell runs. During those shared meals, we talked, we laughed and we dove deeper into each other's lives. You'd be suprised by the frank and earnest conversations you can have with someone over a plate of lasagna. I learned that meal times didn't have to be silence mixed with the sounds of forks scraping china, but that meals could be opportunities to be challenged, uplifted, and enlightened.
You'll learn that you are a mess.
Before I was an intern, I knew I was a sinner. I knew I had broken commandments, but I didn't know that I was a complete and utter mess. Having other interns point out the mess in my life (with compassion, not with condemnation) helped me to see that I didn't need a Savior to cover the 10 Commandments I had broken, but to absolutely bath every piece of my life in grace. I realized that I wasn't just a rulebreaker, but that I was a heartbreaker. I realized that I didn't love people well, didn't love myself well, and most importantly, didn't love God well.
I wasn't a ship with a hole in it. I was a ship at the bottom of the ocean.
You'll learn that God will never stop loving you.
Grace. If there was one word that captured my mind my first summer as an intern, it was Grace. That mysterious and overwhelming gift from God that says, "I am not just your Creator. I am not just your King. I am your Father; Your Abba." Most times as Christians, I think we hear that God forgives us and we are thankful, but we don't necessarily see how big a deal that really is. By seeing how big of a mess I really was, God showed me how big He really is. He showed me how small I am so that I could see how big He is and in that---that He really does have everything under control.
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Now the internship didn't turn me into a finished product by any means, but it helped show me that my journey with God will be a lifelong journey; not to be put aside or made second, but something to be continually focused on.
The internship at SCCC was my next step. Is it yours?
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