the silence of sickness

I've been ill for the past week after reacting badly to the anesthetic and post-surgery medications I received for a simple surgery to remove two kidney stones. That I didn't actually need the surgery was only discovered during the surgery just added insult to injury.

I can't blame anyone for the fact that my body has a total intolerance to medication and completely collapses after anesthetic. It seems the same body can crush a 5mm kidney stone without skipping a beat, but falls apart at being put to sleep and giving meds to help deal with pain and infection.

I'm sitting up, eating a Saltine cracker to ensure I have something in my stomach before taking the medication for the Stent that is still in my body. Fortunately, it will be removed tomorrow at 1pm. I'm praying fervently that there will be no surprises or complications.

I promise I'll write a real blog next week to fill the silence of this week.....

Hope your week has been less interesting than mine!

what we do......

We had a couple over for dinner last night. We reached a point in the evening where we were discussing Young Life College and it came out that they didn't know what I'd been doing for 6 months as they don't receive our monthly newsletter. When I mentioned the blog Michelle said it didn't talk about what happened with Young Life College but the blog was mostly concerned with what I was thinking about. So I'm on a quest this morning to find who else feels they don't really know what YLC does.....

So let me begin by saying that if you don't get an email the first week of each month that is from YLC St. Louis and you want to know what we're doing send me an email @ robert.millar74@gmail.com or befriend me on Twitter, Facebook or Googgle +. Each of these has a link to our newsletter.

Next, after last night I've decided that this blog needs to include more of the daily aspects of what is happening in our infant college ministry.

So let me start by introducing the team.

Myself, Ed Bowin, Drew Berson, Ben Harmon, Andrew Wilson, Aaron Adams, Ed Dubberke, Sito Sasieta, and Liz Phillips.

We range in age from 21 to 81 and vocationally from students to a retiree.

When people think of college ministry in general or discover what I do for a living I get a lot of divergent reactions. But the most common reaction is a version of the cartoon at the top of the blog. A kind of sleazy door-to-door salesman trying to offload a particularly difficult product. It is even worse in some aspects for my team-mates who volunteer their time to do this. "You do this for free!?!"

I love the caricatures of what we do.... the one below relfects what people imagine when they decide we're the "cooler" type of Christians. We'll be in a bar with a beer before we tell you that you're immoral!

But the truth is even more humorous at times than the cartoon version of what we do. The next cartoon captures the heart of what we actually aim for, which is being a part of the group who are helping students find their true self and then often helping them come to terms with the shock of that real person.

And as we are Christian there are always those deeply theological questions we get asked....

and finally one of the favorite aspects of my work.... the much quoted desire Christians have for a need for tolerance....

So if you ever wondered what a college ministry aspires to be..... now you know.....

if you are not connected to our many channels of communication pick one or all of them and find out more of our funny world....