Thoughts

I'd been planning on posting my thoughts on leaving home and high school and leaving for college but never got around to it. Things got a little busy the last few days in New Jersey. So I'm in the car writing in "textedit" and planning on pasting this as a post into blogger once I get an internet connection.

I remember when I was a junior thinking I wasn't quite ready to leave TCS. And I wasn't, but now I am. Much as I loved Trinity, the more I think about it the happier I am that I'm not going back to high school. Very happy, even if I can't completely explain why. But I'll miss my friends, teachers, Mr. Prol, and other TCS people, of course.

Graduating and heading off to college means saying farewell to all that is familar in New Jersey. Here are some of the things I think I'll miss.
- my parents and family. And more generally I think I'll miss living with people who are older and wiser than I am. Living in a dorm with a lot of people my age will be a big adjustment.
- my church family. I'll especially miss playing the piano in church. I really really hope I can find a church in Wheaton where I can serve at the piano. It's very important to me.
- my puppy and involvement with Seeing Eye. I think I'll come back during breaks to say hello to my puppy raising friends and to work a pup during meetings but it'll never be the same. I'll miss being with animals. Telly can really be wonderful, comfortable company sometimes. Perhaps I'll meet some nice lab that I cna walk sometimes. That would be nice.
- my piano teacher
- my car. I think I'll miss the independence it gives, the ability to get away. And I'm quite fond of Clyde.
- good, strong coffee. I've discovered during the past couple days that midwesterners like it watery and flavorless.
- land that isn't completely flat
- good pizza and bagels
- hearing NJ and NY accents. They can be ugly when strong, but full of character.
- West Orange. I'll miss the people I saw regularly on walks. They don't know my name but they recognize me and my puppy and smile and wave. The Middle Eastern man at the gas station bows when he sees me; the Columbian man on the corner says, "It is a pleasure to see you. It is a pleasure to see you." That's pretty special.
- the bakery in Orange where we buy our bread. The kind man there has known me since I was a little girl. He used to give me cookies and tell me I had a pretty smile. Last week when I went to buy bread for the last time there he gave it to me for free and told me to spend the money on something when I got to colllege.

That long list makes it sound like i'm really sad to leave home. I know I'll miss it, but I'm excited for what's before me - excited to be making new friends, stuyding music, taking classes of my choice, living in a dorm, experiencing new things, having a little more independence. Every time I've voiced some worry (like about making friends or being very intimidated by the conservies I read about on facebook) someone calms my fears and reminds me that God is in control and has promised to supply all my needs in the future as He has in the past. What have I to fear?

Reynosa Pictures

In Reynosa we stay in a building called Casa Verde. It's ugly on the outside, but the inside is so warm and inviting. There's an atrium area, open to the sky, with benches and rocking chairs. If you sit there and look up you see this cross and below it this poster, plants, etc. It's a great place to meet for worship, talk with friends, play spoons. . .

This sign can be translated, "Isaiah 55 Mission - Hope for the Deaf"

There were three work sites this year, as well as Vacation Bible School which was held at a local orphanage. The picture above is of the hospital site. This building willing become a place where patients can stay who are being treated at the hospital and have no place to live. Now they are sleeping in the cars, on the street, etc. I was at this site Thursday and Friday.

Across the street from the hospital site was this site - a second story for a Baptist church. This site was known as the "sweat box".

This is the site where I worked - the Isaiah 55 deaf school. Last summer volunteer teams were building this school; this summer a second story was added for more class rooms and office space! I was at this site, laying block and mixing concrete (by hand!) to put benches in the park surrounding the school. On Thursday evening we came to the park and had a cook-out with the deaf students, their families, and the community.

This picture is from Thursday, the day I worked at the hospital. The big job on Thursday was to pour concrete into the wooden frame that you can see in the picture of the church. The piles of rock and sand and the cement mixer were across the street at the hospital site. One team of workers filled wooden boxes with rock and sand and poured them into the cement mixer with water and cement mix. The cement mixer spit out concrete into wheel barrows which another team wheeled across the street to a couple other girls and me. We shoveled the concrete into buckets and handed them to a couple guys who passed them up the stairs to the second story of the church to a couple guys on ladders who poured the concrete into the frame. The emptied buckets were handed back to us, and so on. I love when we pour concrete. Something about the noise and rush and urgency appeals to me. I turn into a beast armed with a shovel. Maybe it's a New Jersey thing.

I roomed with these three sweet girls (and another one not pictured) from Macon, Georgia. The team from Georgia adopted me into their group, I joined them for their evening meetings and enjoyed hanging out with them. I was a bit worried about coming without friends from Covenant but everyone was so kind - all the church teams, the summer staff, the Isaiah 55 team. What a great experience! I really hope to come back next year as a summer staffer!

This is Robert, a deaf man from Pennsylvania who came down as summer staff. He is raising support to be a teacher at the deaf school. We all learned the sign alphabet so we could talk to him.

This is almost the whole team on Friday after cleaning up at the hospital site. The last work day was a half day and in the afternoon we went shopping in downtown Reynosa. We all left Saturday morning.

Reynosa

Here is the letter that I wrote for my supporters:

Dear Family and Friends,

Thank you so much for praying for me while I was in Reynosa, Mexico! It was an awesome trip. The toughest part was coming home - it always is. For days all I wanted to do was go back, and I was constantly thinking about Mexico - reliving conversations and experiences in my mind. I still am, often.

I think I gained a clearer understanding and appreciation of Isaiah 55's mission while in Reynosa this year. In past years we had almost no contact with the deaf students. This year we gathered one evening in the park by the school for a cookout with the deaf students, their families, and the community. It was very moving to see the deaf children use the language they had been given in the last year. I also had the exciting opportunity during the week to talk via the sign alphabet with a deaf man, Robert Morgret, who is raising support to come down and teach at the deaf school. It is wonderful to think that some day those deaf Mexican children may have the skill in communicating that he has, and Lord willing, a love for Christ and His kingdom as well.

The Lord is abundantly blessing the Isaiah 55 ministry. Last year when I was in Mexico, one of the work teams was building the deaf school for classes beginning in September.
This year twenty-six children are signed up for classes, and they will be very grateful for the second story with classrooms and office space that we built this summer! In addition, just a few weeks ago the Reynosa city council voted to donate the land that the school is on to Isaiah 55! This is more than they could have asked for or imagined!

I wish I could communicate through this letter the joy that I have working in Reynosa with Isaiah 55. I am back home in New Jersey but I miss the people I met there, the unity we felt because of the bond of Christ, the interesting conversations, the strong sense of purpose to our work, the satisfaction of having worked very hard physically, and the spiritual fervor that we all felt. There is a special work happening in Reynosa. Most of us volunteers worked the hardest we ever have in our life, and all of us want to come back!

At the end of the week, John Clow, the missionary who leads the construction teams, invited me to join them as summer staff next year. I don't know what the Lord has planned for me next summer but I am thrilled by this opportunity!

Thanks again for your support!

In Christ,
Carol Miner

Robert made a short video about the work of Isaiah 55 which is on youtube. I tried to figure out how to upload it onto this blog but wasn't successful. But I encourage you to visit the Isaiah 55 blog at www.isaiah55.typepad.com and use the link called "Robert's Video" to watch it.

Musical Celebration

I finally completed my application for Wheaton College's Conservatory of Music! The hour is late, but I thought it a fitting time for a celebratory blog post.

On Saturday Walt Morris recorded, via MP3 recorder and video camera, my audition - a whole bunch of scales and arpeggios, Bach's Invention No. 14, Mozart's Sonata K. 309, and Kabalevsky's Sonatina Op. 13 No. 1, the first movement. It was a lot of music learned through many hours, weeks, months of practice.

I'm quite pleased with the recording. Mr. Berdos said the ajudicators would be listening for both a forest and trees. Some of my trees fell down, but the forest is still there, I think. That's what's important. I feel very much at peace about it all.

Today I wrote an essay on why I want to be a music ed major, and typed up a repertoire list. And just now I stuffed music profile, essay, list, recommendation letters, and the DVD into an addressed envelope. Ah.

Here's the exciting bit. If you would like you can listen to my audition at this web address:
http://home.comcast.net/~wsmorris/c_miner.html

Happy listening!

Spacebook? No. My Face. Wait, no. Facebook.

A couple months ago I got myself a facebook account. I have mixed feelings about it, especially as I've been spending more time on it in recent weeks. I blame it a bit for my lack of blogging recently.

I should probably explain what facebook is for those of you who are more than a decade older than me. Facebook is a social network on the internet to keep in touch with friends. You can view the profiles of friends and see pictures of them, read about their interests, write on a part of their profile called a "wall", and many other things.

I joined facebook initially so I could get copies of my classmate's senior trip pictures whch she posted on her profile. I guess it's good that I did because facebook is how everyone keeps in touch now. E-mail is just way too personal, I guess.

I think facebook is over-rated. It's fun to look at friend's pictures but I'd rather they posted pictures on a blog. That way they'd be more discriminating since pictures take ages to upload on blogger! The profile stating interests and activities is okay, but if that person is really your friend shouldn't you know that stuff already? The wall, I guess, is a good way to greet people you otherwise wouldn't stay in touch with, but generally wall posts tend to be banal and silly even if you do know the person well. (there are exceptions) And they don't make for the best reading since one person's wall will be half of a dozen different conversations.

But at the same time I'm grateful for facebook. I'm now "facebook friends" with many of the people I went to Reynosa with, even with one guy I met in the airport who had also been on a missions trip. These are all really neat people whom I enjoyed working with and getting to know and if it weren't for facebook we wouldn't be in touch at all.

One of facebooks redeeming features are its "groups". You can join a group about a certain topic or event, etc for discussion with other people in the group. That's a bit vague. For example, I am a member of a group started by one of my classmates called "Read: What Intelligent People Do". The idea was that we can recommend books and discuss what we've been reading. The problem is that nobody does. But that's another story. I'm also a member of a group called "Wheaton College Class of 2011". Us future Wheaties can write any questions we have on the group's wall and the group administrators, Wheaton students, will answer them. There are also discussion topics about the best way to buy books or what you will need for your dorm room, etc. Some of it is quite useful, but it's a drag looking through the stuff that isn't to find the good stuff.

I've been thinking a lot about facebook because through it I'm meeting my future classmates. I've gotten several friend requests from girls who will be on my floor, suitemates, etc. I don't quite know what to think of this. For one thing it means I'm spending more time updating my profile, creating photo albums, etc. If they're going to make the effort to "friend" me then I want there to be something for them to look at. Maybe this is a waste of time. It's addictive in a way. Maybe I should go on a weeklong facebook fast. I've visited the profiles of these girls too - looked at pictures of them, read their interests, activities, favorite quotes, etc. I wonder what's going to happen when I actually meet them. I don't know them, yet I know their birthday, the name of their boyfriend, and I've seen their prom pictures. They don't know me, but they've seen pictures of my niece and nephews. There is this bizarre mix of familiarity and something else that starts with an 's' or maybe an 'a' that I can't think of at this second.

Hmmph.

Will I give up on facebook? No.