Kansas-check, Iowa-underway

The day was February 7. A lot of planning had been put into the evening's event: The Young Adult Celebration (an EMM alumni/young adult event celebrating what God had done through short term missions). There was food, booths, displays, etc. and by the time the evening was over, the cleanup was pretty much finished, and we had separated things by where they had to be taken/returned, it was finally time to rest and recooperate from the somewhat stressful day. Well, it felt like it was time to...just one problem. It was actually time to drive back to HDC, unpack the van, pack a different one...and drive to Kansas. So by midnight, we finally pulled out of the back gate at HDC.

19 hours later, marked by seeing the homes of the Indianapolis Colts, St. Louis Cardinals and Rams, and Kansas City Chiefs and Royals (Given Audrey's enthusiastic out-of-the-window tactics, she probably would have mentioned the St. Louis arch before any of these), we pulled into Hesston, Kansas. We stayed with Erica's great aunt and uncle who's back yard is basically the Hesston College campus.

So the next few days were spent doing various recruiting activites at Bethel College and Hesston College that included doing chapel at Hesston, manning our booth, and inviting students to a local resterant for free cheesy fries (never have I tasted anything like them) to connect with them and answer any questions they had about any of our programs, etc.

We also did some non-recruiting activites such as visiting with our former volunteer staff member Ryan Yoder (this visit included riding his friend's old jeep and four wheeler, well, before Jacki killed it), revisiting some of my fondest childhood memories in a 400 page book of Curious George, getting camera happy at a nature reserve in Hutchinson (maybe I'll post some pictures when we get back), and playing Settlers of Catan, to name a few.

Sunday we split up and did presentations at three different churches.

Monday we were back in the van all day driving to Iowa. We stopped at IHOP (IHOPrayer, as it should be called. Why, why, why would anyone even consider this name when the pancakes place already exists? This has been baffling me for quite a while. It's not as if "International House of ---" is such a common way of phrasing things in the English language that they couldn't refrain from rewording it a little bit. Does something like "House of Prayer" or "International House of Prayer and Exaltation" or "The Prayer Center" sound so bad? And I made those up on the spot! Surely someone could come up with something better with a little time and thought. Here I try to remind myself that not everyone cares as much as I do if something makes absolutely no logical sense. Some people just don't notice things like that, though how they don't is beyond me. Either that or they thought it would be incredibly clever to spoof International House of Pancakes. Um...as every child should be taught, 1 level of cleverness does not justify 5 levels of confusion. Okay, maybe that shouldn't be our educational system's priority. But it's probably not bad advice for anyone getting ready to name a business/organiztion/etc. Just make up your own name. It's better that way. It really is. Unless your marketing to people who don't think like me. Which is lots and lots of people. Okay, your call on that one. I think I'll stop ranting now, after I throw in the disclaimer that maybe IHOPrayer existed before IHOPancakes? I don't think this is the case, but if so, the last paragraph is simply a bunch of uniformed nonsense). We also saw at least 33 deer in Iowa. And an infinite number of cows.

So now we're getting ready for chapel at Iowa Mennonite School tomorrow morning unless the weather forcasters earn their paycheck and the snow they're calling for cancels school. So, you might never hear me say this ever, ever again, I'm hoping someone get's paid tomorrow for botching their job.

-Ben