Well so the summer ended and we were back in Midland. I think the thing we were most excited about was to be able to sleep in our bed again. I tell you what, there is nothing like that after sleeping on plastic dorm mattresses for the last ten weeks. That in and of itself is a sacrifice. Especially considering they are twin size mattresses that we have to push together.
Anyway, we got back to the office and back to Midland. We were excited to be back in Midland and were excited to jump back in with our church. I jumped back in with the high school ministry with the church and Angela jumped back in with the little kids. She loves serving with the group of babies that are just beginning to crawl. She really enjoys it. I have been helping out with the high school students at church for the last couple of years. It is an interesting group of students. Our church has between 4000 and 5000 members and so as you can imagine there are quite a few students. Most, though, don't walk out righteousness in their life and most would not claim to try and honor Christ with their lives. This makes for an interesting group, but it is really group as we try to challenge them as to how and why they should choose to follow Christ with their lives.
Well, as you can also imagine I am sure, when we get back from the summer it is quite a challenge to get caught up on all of the paperwork and what not that was not done during the course of the summer. I had a pile of mail that took me literally almost an hour to go through the entire pile. It was everything from junk mail to deposit slips, to banking statements, and all kinds of other things. Being in charge of all of the financial books and reconciling them, it makes it difficult when I am not able to do that during the summer. So, when I get back, I have three months worth of reconciling to do as well as all of the credit cards statements. So, that was one of my first goals upon arrival back in the office. Then it was also time to begin planning for fall camp. Fall camp is tricky because we have to hire college students to serve as staff members but we have to find a way to get them out of college for the week or look for those not in school at the time. So, I also began to recruit staff members for that camp.
As we all adjusted to being back here in Midland we realized the toll that traveling the summer had taken on us and on Andrew. Almost as soon as we got back he was able to sleep through the night and we enjoyed being able to sleep in a separate room than him. For Angela it was an adjustment as she stayed home with Andrew and spent the day with him. She comes by the office almost weekly but her emphasis was on caring for Drew during the days. For me it was also an adjustment but in different ways. It honestly was weird not being at work with Angela every day. I had to be more intentional about the time I spent with her at home and the time I spent with Drew when I got home because I was at work every day. So, that was a really good thing it just took some time to adjust to that.
As far as the office was concerned there were adjustments there as well. We had two new people working for us in our office. Sarah from Florida and Josh from Philly. We started by rearranging the office so that Josh and I were sharing an office and Sarah had her own office. It was also an adjustment in how the work was getting done. Though my main responsibilities did not change necessarily, I was now more concerned with making sure that both Josh and Sarah not only had work to do, but that they knew how to do what they were doing. I also began sharing some responsibility with Josh such as recruiting staff for fall camp. So, after a few weeks things settled down a little bit and we became more comfortable in our roles within the office.
Now the big decision we had to make as a ministry was what to do for the following summer. We have had two teams doing camps one on the east coast and one on the west coast. Now we had to decide whether to stay at two teams or to go to three teams. One doing east, one doing west, and one doing central. Not only deciding whether we were going to go to three teams but where we were going to go and who was going to go where. That will be the next update.
Thank you for your prayers and your support as we serve with Worldview.
Mike Tiland
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