The Status of My Relationship with God, part 2

As promised, this is part two to the timeline of my relationship with church and God. I left off with finding a church in Chicago, so I'm just going to jump right in. If you haven't read part 1, click here [x].

Finding a church in Chicago turned out to be a lot harder than I'd anticipated. Chicago is huge. I knew this, of course. But because it was so big, trying to find a church was daunting. I had really only ever attended two churches--the one I'd grown up in and my grandparent's church. There were denominations, locations, sizes, and traditional versus contemporary to consider. Luckily, my roommate was interested in finding a church too. One Saturday night in September, we finally decided on a church. It was a mega-church (6000 people there on a Sunday morning), but it had a promising college ministry. We went to service the next morning, and I did not like it. There were too many people. There was a program that had every minute planned out. And I don't know if it just happened to be the service that we went to, but they had some sort of induction for new members of the church. Like member members, the special elite club of the church. The ceremony took up quite a bit of time--there were like 50 people--that could probably have been spent on something more spiritual. I know that a lot of churches have membership like that, but it felt like something meant to condemn those who weren't part of the club. (And in any case, I, personally, don't think that a membership like that is something to be paraded in front of the rest of the congregation for the sake of exclusion.) Anyway, despite the both of us disliking the main service, we decided to check out the college service on Thursday.

Intro to My Ph.D. Program Search

As I prepare for the fall semester, I have some things to consider on top of the normal school things. Beginning in late September and early October, I have to start filling out applications for Ph.D. programs. And while I am normally a procrastinator, there is one thing that I have never procrastinated on and that is selecting the schools and programs that I want to apply to. I'm pretty sure that I started my undergrad search in the beginning of my junior year of high school, and I know that it was well before senior year started. And when I first thought of going to Chicago, I wasted no time looking for the programs that I could go to. When applying for graduate school, I had a list ready by the end of my junior year--though that was for law school and I changed my mind over the summer. So, of course, my search for Ph.D. programs started months ago. As a matter of fact, I have a detailed document with the schools and programs, the amount of funding they offer, the application fees and deadlines, and the averages of how long it takes people to get through the program.

And here's where you get to learn how ridiculous I am...

I have a system of rating programs to figure out which programs have the best combination of things that I desire. This involves the location of the school, the amount of funding available, and the features of the program. Each category gets a score, and then I add the scores together to get a composite score. Then the programs are ranked by composite score from lowest to highest with the lowest being number one on my list. I have 8 programs from 8 different schools on my list. I don't anticipate adding or subtracting any programs between now and the time applications are due.

So, let's go through the list.

The Status of My Relationship with God, part 1

For the first of my serious posts, I want to walk through the timeline of my relationship with church and with God. I think it will be helpful for readers to understand what got me to where I am now. I am prepared for this post to either be really long, or so long that I need to make it more than one post. This is your warning.

I'm going to begin as close to the beginning as I can. In 1997, my dad attended church with a work friend. My dad and mom grew up in church, but they had moved from Indiana to Louisiana in 1995, and they hadn't found a church in which they felt comfortable. This church was not the first church they'd attended since the move, but it was the place my dad finally felt comfortable. He attended for a while before he brought Mom and us to a service. But once Mom attended, it wasn't long before we were in attendance every week. That was in the summer of 1998. I was almost 6, and Ashley was turning 4.