Options

I foresee options ahead of me in my career. The previous 4 weeks I have been teaching a lot. Last Sunday I taught for an hour on the Book of Acts to a more mature audience than I’m used to in high school ministry. I think the youngest person, other than me of course, was in their 40’s and the oldest in their 70’s. When I came in, no one thought I was the teacher. (They probably thought I was there to set up the powerpoint projector or something). I’ve never taught adults for a solid hour before, it was interesting. Maybe the most astounding thing was that the people actually wanted to listen to me. They were giving me their undivided attention, meanwhile I’m used to high schoolers who are text messaging their friends, talking, sleeping, eating, generally not paying attention. I was nervous in the beginning, but soon I kind of sunk into it. I think the people got something out of it. I had printed copies of my powerpoint slides for everyone so they wouldn’t have to write everything all out. When I had finished I had a few people come up and ask some questions on the text and thank me for coming. Work at church has been going well, I think.

From that teaching, I had a adjunct professor at Biola ask me to help him out as a teacher’s assistant for some of his ESL classes. I have worked as a TA before, grading papers and all that. It’s not glamorous work, really it’s a pain in the ass. Grading 30 horrible 6-8 page papers when you need to write two 8 page papers of your own is not that fun. But, it is work in the educational system like I have been interested in doing in the long run.

I’ve contemplated working as a chaplain. As I get closer to finishing my MDiv, I have thought about the possibility of working as a hospital chaplain. I have never really done much work in this area, therefore I doubt my abilities a great deal. I see all the ways I’m unqualified, the major one is that the average age of the hospital chaplain in America is 60 years old. It’s hard to help people, or rather it’s hard to convince people you can help them when they are 35 years older than you. That’s just reality. I think a way that I can bypass all that is a hospital like CHOC, Children’s Hospital of Orange County. In a hospital devoted to children and teens, I am in a far better place than a 60 year old to help. Rachelle did clinicals at CHOC last semester and said their chaplain had quit and they were looking for another. The only problem is I need to finish my degree before they will hire me. I want to see if I’m even cut out for this kind of work, so I am going to ask our Care Pastor, in charge of weddings, funerals, chaplain for Whittier PD, etc., if I can tag along with him. Maybe get my feet wet a bit.