Only a few more bulletin board posts and I am DONE!  Done with what, you might ask?  Done with SCHOOL!  Ok, there are actually a few more things that I need to do besides some posts, but I should back up a bit.

When I was fifteen, I heard God’s call in my life to be a Director of Christian Education (DCE).  Well, I also wanted to marry a pastor, but I figured I didn’t have a lot of control over that one.  I was a sophomore in high school, at that age when everyone starts asking seriously what you want to do when you grow up.  I settled on DCE and didn’t look back.  It led to me picking my college, my freshman classes, what scholarship I applied for, everything.

Then I met Travis, and we started dating.  He was going to be a pastor.  Perfect!  While our relationship had its ups and downs, I knew I wanted to marry him from the beginning.  So I started to think rationally about my major (this was sophomore year of college), and my thinking led me to the belief that a pastor and a DCE can’t be married to each other.  The way I looked at it, either they would have to work in separate churches (and not worship together) or work together at the same church and struggle to keep boundaries between work & home.  So I switched majors a couple of times and ended up with a degree in theology and English, which pretty much prepared me to do nothing.

God seems to have the last laugh a lot in my life.  My husband’s first call after seminary was to be a mission developer in Buffalo.  He wasn’t attached to a specific church, and I found myself working part-time in youth ministry for a church.  I began working on the DCE thing again at that time, entering an online MA degree program through Concordia.  Then, halfway through, Travis took a call to Salem, so I could not complete the internship portion of certification to be a DCE.  I worked for a couple of years for a not-for-profit in Springville, and then in March 2007 our congregation hired me as Director of Parish Ministry.  So here I am, working with my husband.  Yes, the boundaries between home and work are difficult to maintain, but not impossible.

So last August, I went back into online schooling through Concordia to finish up this DCE certification thing.  I am in the last weeks of my internship, which coincided with classes online, and we had our final chat session on Monday.  Just a few more posts, and I can remove the link from my web browser.  Then in September, I will go to Minnesota for my certification interview.  Then I can say that I am really done.  Other than preparing for the interview, August will feel relaxing.  Summer ministry will wrap up, school will be over, fall education programs won’t get going until September.  I’m looking forward to it.