I often refer to my Pinterest boards as my idea bank where I make frequent deposits to a board and enjoy withdrawing ideas as often as possible.  Recently, I bought the necessary items to complete a project with my family for a photo I had pinned.  After completing the project and giving one of them away, my kids and I were not even remotely expecting the reaction we received.

When the programs of the Office of Vocation & Ministry were just getting going, I was troubled at having to spend part of the annual budget on “evaluation.” I was skeptical about the whole task of evaluation itself. Isn’t it what businesses do, but is foreign to our vision of Orthodox ministry?

My skepticism had begun during my final year in seminary, when I started refusing to fill out the evaluation form at the end of semester. If the course was a generally good course, all I would say on the form was “thank you.”  This came from the idea that my first goal was to be a student of the Tradition. The Tradition (starting with the Scriptures, and Tradition then as Scripture-rightly-interpreted) teaches me; I have not earned the right to critique the Tradition, or by extension the professor teaching, because both the levels of my knowledge and spiritual awareness are too novice.

It’s an honor to be asked to join this wonderful blogging community and to read some of the other blogs and get a sense for what a blog is all about. I’ll admit: I struggle with the genre and am more than a bit apprehensive about taking up this task.

I wrote all the time in college. In fact, my senior thesis was a 130-page series of connected short stories—at that time in my life I wanted to be a writer. But then I ended up at seminary and put all of my creative writing and even journaling on hold in order to turn off my inner writer’s voice--which was talking too much and not letting me learn. (I would walk through a door and the writer voice would say, “She walked through the door”—it was exhausting.)