It?s been quite a while since I?ve written and it hasn?t been due to lack of anything happening. More the lack of any sort of resolution. For those of you who?ve been paying some attention to what has been going on in my life a major point right now has been STINT (Short Term INTernational, a year in another country) and how to spend my next year. It all started last December when I felt God really fire up my heart to go on STINT to France. A couple days after the Christmas conference I filled out my application and I was in the process of heading to France, or so I thought.
The end of January I got an email to start an application with a university in Toulouse that would help me get my visa for the upcoming year. I was able to get the form filled out and my application started, I simply need to get a copy of my diploma to them by the 15th. After applying the end of January I was sent back into waiting to hear if I had been accepted into the internship or not.
It had been a couple weeks and I finally got my follow up phone call to answer some questions that they had about my application. After talking and answering questions I found out that they had a rule that basically didn’t allow me to go on STINT. That destroyed me, everyone i had talked to, every prayer I had asked had been answered, I had dreams about being in toulouse, and it was just really hard for me to now realize that I wasn’t going. It caused a lot of tension in my relationship with God and He really showed me a lot about myself through that. Broke me back down to where I belonged, physically that appeared to be here at UW Stout. Needless to say I was furious at Campus Crusade for allowing me to go through so much of the application process with seminally no chance to go. There were emails and phone calls back and forth between the Regional office and myself.
Fast forward to yesterday, during discipleship with Derek, I got a phone call from someone over at regional. I figure it’s a follow up call because of my complaint. That she was calling to help repair any hard feelings and to smooth rough edges. We decided to talk this morning. She introduced herself as the one in charge of Staff and Intern Development (I believe) and proceeded to tell me what has been going on over there at the regional office in all their ‘bureaucratic junk.’ It turns out that the rule that was keeping me from STINT was never actually written down when they discussed it last year, and on top of that it was only within our region. At this point I’m getting pretty worked up over the seeming lack of administrative poignancy (i believe thats the word i’m looking for) and just how poorly things seem to be running. She proceeded to tell me how she was impressed with my email, to him who interviewed me, regarding my feelings and view of Crusade and also addressed His response to me.
So why am I asking for my heart to stop being played with? Simply because it turns out no one over there was on the same page with that rule the either way. They sat down and discussed our correspondence and were able to get all onto the same page. My major complaint was of the lack of consistency with the rule, that because I attend a four year school I had to be out of my third year, were if I was at a two year community/tech school I could go at the end of that time period. Because of that they decided to simplify and state that after two years (out of sophomore year) you could go on STINT.
Now I’m stuck here trying to figure out what to do, I had my heart so set on going to France and since I heard I wouldn’t be going I really sought hard to seek the Lord for contentment in being here next year. The door that appeared to have been shut is now reopened. Please keep me in your prayers, that I would be able to discern what is going on and the difference between my desires and God’s will. It will also give me a chance to really seek counsel that I wasn’t able to (or didn’t want to) do before.
Oh Father I deserve nothing,
~paul