Getting Used to "New"

I thought about putting my title as getting used to the "different", but I thought that it's not the right mindset to have.

Quite obviously, everything has been different for me so far. The biggest change is the whole living in community aspect. I'm still not exactly used to it even though it's been better than I thought. Especially the last few days, I've been having trouble working myself up to interacting with people. In a sense, I've really caved into myself again. I remember the last few nights where I just kind of sat in my bed while there seemed to be quite a bit of stuff happening outside and I just kind of sat there not doing anything - no real thoughts or anything. And to kind of make things worse, I'm just consistently tired now, even with a full night's sleep. This doesn't really bode well because this is the week that I really have to start working.

Maybe there's too much on my mind? Who knows. But with school and a lot of other extracurricular things, it's seeming like I don't have any time on the down low. Even going to church has a bit of a school motif behind it because I'm doing my practicum. If things keep going like this, I don't even want to begin imagining what it feels like for the people to have burnt out.

And more recently, as in the last couple months, my mind has been constantly clouded with one thing; so even if I am not thinking about school or church, I'm thinking about this other thing. I feel like it's just such a battle in my brain when I'm trying to focus, it keeps popping up - kind of distracting.

With church, it's really neat to see what kind of an experience each one brings. With South Gate Alliance, it's been really interesting. I think that if I were just visiting or casually attending, I wouldn't think too much of it; but because I'm a practicum student at this church, I kind of automatically start thinking about how things are run and maybe how it can be better. I was raised a certain way so I'm going to think about how I would want to do things to change a worship service to form into the way that I grew up seeing it. I think it's perfectly natural, but I probably shouldn't be jumping to conclusions so fast about how this area could be this way, or that could be that way. So I tried to change my point of view during this morning's worship to try to see things in a new way, but I'm not going to lie, it was tough.

In a sense, this excites me because I get to see a pretty different way of structure and maybe even emphasis in how a church's routine week can look like. So I guess what I'm really saying is that, other than the size of the church, South Gate is next to nothing like NEAC. Don't get me wrong though, I don't mind, I just need to get used to it.

So as another week is about to begin, I just hope that I can recharge enough because a majority of my courses are front loaded and so most of the work will be done before the end of October. I definitely also need to take time to force myself to not think about or do anything related to school, church, and whatever else distracts me from having God first in my life, and just spend time reading the Bible, praying and listening to God. I know it'll be tough, but I have to do it.