Project: RECONNECT
I am embarking on a journey that is as much sentimental as it is professional. After a reunion weekend in Kentucky for a wedding, I was able to touch base with Julie Posey, with whom I worked during the summer of 2000. We conjured up old memories and threw out names like we were CIA informants. Catching up was fun and an idea was quickly born: before the end of the year, I will reconnect with everyone I worked with that summer, now five years ancient history.
Summer quickly became a time during my college years that represented a chance to get away from everything you had learned and developed over the last nine months in order to quickly get 20 friends and make money in the process. It was a time of fun and growth, but also a time of tightly-knit relationships, a time to carry the burdens of others, and a time to walk the fine line between being completely transparent and divulging your deepest secrets. In a sense, there has never been, nor may there ever be, a professional situation like the ones I had for the summers of 2000, 2001, and 2002. There is something absolutely magical about the people you spend your summers with. I want to see if that magic can transcend time and “life.”
RECONNECTion #1: Julie Posey
Being a rookie that summer, I had a lot to learn from Julie Posey, who was a “veteran” as we called them. She knew how to survive a summer on the road, how to balance changing the lives of young people with taking care of yourself and keeping in touch with your family. She was someone who can talk to anyone (even the deaf, as she is fluent in sign language), and who was a proven leader with a sacrificial heart.
I learned this best a year after we worked together. Having not spoken in over six months, I needed a car to get from Georgetown, Kentucky to the airport in Louisville, about an hour away. Julie was the only person I knew who lived in Kentucky, so, out of the blue, I called her and asked her for a HUGE favor.
Julie pulled up with her brother in tow and jumped out of the car, happy to see me. As she did, I could hear her apply the emergency break, which could only mean one thing: she drove a stick shift. It wouldn’t be a big deal, except, I didn’t know how. Undeterred, she still allowed me to borrow a car, and with the help of some new teammates (with whom I hope to reconnect next year) I was able to learn the basics without disintegrating her clutch. It takes a special person to willingly give their only car to a virgin-manual-transmission driver so he can get his sorry self to the airport, and then carry him 60 miles back two days later. My offer of dinner last Saturday didn’t quiet even things out in my mind.
After talking I learned that Julie is still the person I remember her to be. The highlight of the last five years for her was the birth of her niece, whose pictures are wallpapered all over her office. She helped me dream up this gimmick, this fantasy, this wild ride into the past in which I will try to have a reconnecting phone or face-to-face conversation with the 19 people I spent the first summer “on my own.”
This project intrigues me. I look forward to finding out what everyone’s highlight of the last five years has been. I’m pretty sure each person’s highlight will relate to some sort of personal relationship: weddings, engagements, births, deaths. I’m quite certain that no one’s highlight will be discovering every facet of the predestination vs. free will argument or finally finding out that they are an infralapsarian. More and more I realize that our great theological moments are not ones we experience when reading the great tomes of the past, but when we write our own legacies of the present, when we discover that love really is the greatest, and is even greater when given freely. For Julie at least, that theory seems to hold up.
Stay tuned for 18 more updates.
Summer quickly became a time during my college years that represented a chance to get away from everything you had learned and developed over the last nine months in order to quickly get 20 friends and make money in the process. It was a time of fun and growth, but also a time of tightly-knit relationships, a time to carry the burdens of others, and a time to walk the fine line between being completely transparent and divulging your deepest secrets. In a sense, there has never been, nor may there ever be, a professional situation like the ones I had for the summers of 2000, 2001, and 2002. There is something absolutely magical about the people you spend your summers with. I want to see if that magic can transcend time and “life.”
RECONNECTion #1: Julie Posey
Being a rookie that summer, I had a lot to learn from Julie Posey, who was a “veteran” as we called them. She knew how to survive a summer on the road, how to balance changing the lives of young people with taking care of yourself and keeping in touch with your family. She was someone who can talk to anyone (even the deaf, as she is fluent in sign language), and who was a proven leader with a sacrificial heart.I learned this best a year after we worked together. Having not spoken in over six months, I needed a car to get from Georgetown, Kentucky to the airport in Louisville, about an hour away. Julie was the only person I knew who lived in Kentucky, so, out of the blue, I called her and asked her for a HUGE favor.
Julie pulled up with her brother in tow and jumped out of the car, happy to see me. As she did, I could hear her apply the emergency break, which could only mean one thing: she drove a stick shift. It wouldn’t be a big deal, except, I didn’t know how. Undeterred, she still allowed me to borrow a car, and with the help of some new teammates (with whom I hope to reconnect next year) I was able to learn the basics without disintegrating her clutch. It takes a special person to willingly give their only car to a virgin-manual-transmission driver so he can get his sorry self to the airport, and then carry him 60 miles back two days later. My offer of dinner last Saturday didn’t quiet even things out in my mind.
After talking I learned that Julie is still the person I remember her to be. The highlight of the last five years for her was the birth of her niece, whose pictures are wallpapered all over her office. She helped me dream up this gimmick, this fantasy, this wild ride into the past in which I will try to have a reconnecting phone or face-to-face conversation with the 19 people I spent the first summer “on my own.”
This project intrigues me. I look forward to finding out what everyone’s highlight of the last five years has been. I’m pretty sure each person’s highlight will relate to some sort of personal relationship: weddings, engagements, births, deaths. I’m quite certain that no one’s highlight will be discovering every facet of the predestination vs. free will argument or finally finding out that they are an infralapsarian. More and more I realize that our great theological moments are not ones we experience when reading the great tomes of the past, but when we write our own legacies of the present, when we discover that love really is the greatest, and is even greater when given freely. For Julie at least, that theory seems to hold up.
Stay tuned for 18 more updates.
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