Just Growing Up...

I had an interview today in downtown Nashville. I paid an absurd amount for parking, pulled on my stilettos, stuck my head up with Daddy's old briefcase of 20 years in my hand, and walked a 1/2 mile to my interview in 90 degree weather. I walked in the building handed the sweet building guard my license and he made me a temporary id. I went through the glass doors and had my interview. This interview was not for a job, but for an internship which at this point is just as important. I felt grown-up doing these things. Walking in between such large buildings and passing such expensive suits I thought to myself how much my professional life had to catch up to.

Sunday night I got a renewed sense of what I really hope to do with my degree. I was casually doing some current event research between NPR and HuffingtonPost.com and stumbled across a load of organizations and uproar over the very thing I was considering doing my Master's thesis on over the next year. Up to this point, I had really thought that I was shooting in the dark with my hopes and dreams. I was becoming discouraged at the lack of awarenes and research being done on my area of interest until Sunday night.

What is that focus? I want to develop mentoring programs that will lower high school drop out rates and thus at-risk behavior in low income youth. This is it. This is what I have been so interested and captivated by even in youth ministry all these years. The rabbit hole that lead me to discover the unturned rock of outside interest was a documentary called The Interrupters. It is a non-profit agency in Chicago set on Evidence Based Practice to lower teenage shootings. It was inspiring and I hope to get the full film through Netflix soon. Then I stumbled on a program in Washington called Friends of the Children. This former CEO founded the organization with people who are committed to the program for at least 12 years. They are trained and paid as full time employees to mentor up to 8 children starting at an early age all the way through high-school graduation. I was astounded!

This is what I would like to be a part of. This is what I would eventually like to bring back to my home state and use it to address the dropout rates in AL. I felt so alone before in the idea that I was conjuring, but not anymore. I can look up and out with relief that there are others that are just as interested in the power of human relationship as I am. One person can change another person that could change the world in which they live. Not every life will be completely altered, but they may be forever a bit different because of that one person, that one moment of investment. Well, I am just a bamboo shoot growing a mile a minute; hope to catch you on the next mile!