New Job

I guess I am just a facebook junkie. For those of you who follow me here and not there, my apologies.

I have been hired by a hospice inpatient unit here in Wilmington as their Spiritual Care Coordinator. I will also put in a few hours a week with another unit just across the line in PA doing spiritual care and bereavement. Between the two units I will have enough hours to be classified as full time.

God has certainly blessed me and provided for me since September when my residency ended. Please join with me in praising and thanking God for that. Also join me in praying for God to give patience to those who are still waiting for their answers.

Blizzard of 2009

Well, it is not necessarily like the blizzards we had in Wyoming, but close. In Delaware we had a major storm dropping 17 inches here in Wilmington. The pictures below are from my balcony about half way through the snowfall. It is beautiful but treacherous. I took off for work in the throes of the blizzard yesterday morning and it took me an hour and 45 minutes to get there when it usually takes me about 40 minutes. At 1:00 DelDOT announced that it would declare a state of emergency effective at 3:00, so my boss let me go ahead and go home. It took 3 hours to get home. The traffic on the highway was about 15-20 mph and about every 20 minutes or so the whole line of traffic stopped and everyone got out and cleared the ice from the windshield wipers.

Merry Christmas to all, and if you have a white Christmas I hope and pray that it is a safe one.

Working it out

After two months of basically sitting on the couch waiting for the phone to ring, I have noticed that suddenly my pants have shrunk - or my rear has spread, whichever you want to believe. Anyway, there is a gym close to where I live, and I joined it and took on a trainer to get myself back into shape. My goal is to strengthen my core for balance and to improve my stamina. A little strength training coupled with some cardio work should help both my shape and my outlook on life. I worked out yesterday. The trainer suggested that the muscles have memory, so I should see results quicker than I suspect, but the results of trying to get out of bed this morning prove that my own memory of certain muscles is missing.

I was doing squats against a wall with a big ball and standing on a rubber half-ball, and the muscles just above my knee-caps are muscles I forgot I had. I was doing a lunge and lift with a medicine ball, and those obliques are also muscles I forgot about. Somehow I remembered my glutes and stomach muscles, but that doesn't make them hurt any less.

I will be going back in today, and I know that hitting the gym again will work some of this soreness out. I just need to be able to stick with it. The trainers at this gym are awesome.

Good news - FINALLY!!!!

I just returned from Dover. CompUSA is opening a new store there on the Friday after Thanksgiving and I will be one of their Sales Associates. It's not ministry, but it is a job and will help tide me over. I am due to be ordained next fall, and after that I will have a better shot at the ministry positions I have been looking at.

Thanks to everyone for their thoughts and prayers.

On the job front

I am still looking for a job, but some things have looked up. One thing is that the holiday seasonal shopping is about to kick in, so stores are hiring seasonal help. That can get me through the first of the year. A computer store in Dover is opening on the day after Thanksgiving, and my first interview with them went well. I will probably have a second interview early next week. It is a permanent position (not seasonal) and I look at it this way - I can utilize my existing computer skills and have a job to take me through ordination. Once I am ordained, many more doors will open, so we'll just have to see how much patience God is asking me to have.

I Love Fall

I have just discovered how much I love the fall. This picture is a little shaky because it was taken during the dark, but it is a beautiful reminder of God's renewal each morning, even in the face of transition. There is a thicket of trees behind my apartment which gives me a beautiful sunrise each morning, so I decided that I needed to share.



When I lived in Wyoming, a tree was pretty much a big sagebrush, so we didn't get to see the transition of color like happens here in Delaware and all up and down the Atlantic coast. Texas had mostly evergreen trees and what trees that lost their leaves, well the fall happened so fast that if you blinked your eyes you missed it. Kansas was somewhat better, but there was still the long spaces of farmland void of trees.

The following pictures were taken in Maryland where our church had its retreat a couple of weeks ago. The colors there were just spectacular, as you can see from these pictures. I drove to Havre de Grace, Maryland yesterday and about half way there kicked myself for not bringing my camera. God's has a beautiful color scheme for the transition from summer to winter.

Still no news

There is still no news on the job front. I am still waiting to hear from people where I have applied.

On a lighter note, our church retreat is this weekend. It will be a nice weekend away in Maryland. I am looking forward to spending the weekend with a bunch of friends that I am finally getting to know well.