certification and puppies

2 Exciting Pieces of News for the Day:

I met with the Wichita Falls District Committee on Ordained Ministry this evening, and they unanimously voted me as a Certified Candidate for Ordination as a Deacon in the United Methodist Church. I realized it had been nearly 3 years since I last met with that body for my introductory meeting, just before I went to Chile junior year of college. What a difference those years have made. You could say that then I was in undergrad, and now I'm out of college. But when I think about those years, a lot has happened. I spent a month and a half living with 2 adults with developmental disabilities in Santiago, studied for a semester in Valparaiso, traveled around Chile and Argentina, kept working for the Hendrix-Lilly Vocations Initiative, completed my senior year at Hendrix in leadership roles of 2 organizations and graduated with my undergrad degree, helped lead a service trip to the Gulf just after Katrina, went on a mission trip to San Antonio which spurred a summer internship with the same downtown UM congregation and their ministry with the homeless, went on a mission trip to Bolivia, took psychological exams and found out I was uber-boring, spent a year living in intentional community and working full-time as an advertising intern for a major advocacy/magazine publishing not-for-profit organization, and completed my first semester of M.Div. studies. Um, that's kind of a lot. I imagine one of these years in the future will end up less packed than the past few. And I imagine that will be a lovely respite from the go-ing, go-ing, go-ing. But I have to admit - even though making huge decisions like whether to go to start a new educational track, where to go to school, whether to pursue ordination, etc. can be rather tiresome, I find myself hoping that those "resting" years don't last for too long before the next big thing. I certainly don't consider myself one to need for things to be "exciting," but when I step back and look at the past few years, they've been rather that way.

Ok, and puppies - I received word from John that "we have puppies" at the house in Nashville. We've had a pack or so of dogs (mainly just 2 or 3) hanging around our house - sleeping in the yard and what-not - for the past couple months. We were talking just the other day about maybe starting to feed them - they're nice, and it's good to have guard dogs. And then while I'm home in TX, John shoots me an e-mail and says we have 8 puppies. He says they're in the crawl space next door - I don't really know where he's referring to, but at least they're not on our porch. I kind of can't wait to see them, and I know we're not technically supposed to have pets - and I keep saying how I don't need any pets of my own for a long while - but I might not be super-disappointed if we built a fence in the backyard, adopted one or two of the puppies, and kept them in the backyard - and then we'd be even a step closer to having a garden and compost that we wouldn't have to worry about other animals getting into. Yay for domesticity! (if that's a word.)