For the Thursday Triennium sessions, the lesson was Prone to Wander from Luke 15. It contains three parables. Our Albany group talked about two of them, the parable of the lost sheep and the parable of the lost coin.
Our collective had already been using an app called What’s App to communicate, especially on such a big campus. Cleverly, the room was split in two and we had conversations about the parables using the app, instead of talking. It was a useful attempt to have an intergenerational dialogue, and it allowed those who might not feel comfortable speaking up.
Is finding one sheep worth it when you already have 99? Sweeping the whole house was thought to be a whole lot of effort for one coin. I’m texting about metaphors to my group. What, I’m texting?
Incidentally, that day, I got a notification from my phone carrier that I’d used 85% percent of my high-speed data, which had never happened before. The next day, they clearly had reduced my data speeds through the following Monday.
The sermon that day also referenced the third parable, about the prodigal son who was welcomed back.
One important thing I had not mentioned was that, by Tuesday, it was hot as H-E-double hockey sticks, as some friends used to say when I was a kid. The temperatures were in the mid-90s, at least, and it was dreadfully humid. It felt like 104F (40C) or so every day.
I just couldn’t walk nearly a mile for dinner Wednesday night. By Thursday, I surrendered and got rides from one of the golf carts that were driving around after I would walk to breakfast.
The problem is that they had six or seven carts that could carry five people each. They anticipated about 40 people using the carts, but they were moving about 140. So that day, I got to dinner very early – it was better than walking.
I went up to the lounge of Earhart Hall, yes, named for Amelia, above the dining area. I’d see the Purdue students come out of the hallway, only to see this massive line of Presbyterians. No one had told them about the invasion: “they never tell us anything.”
Back at our dorm, I played 8-ball (billiards) with some kids. I loved playing in college, though I was quite terrible. Good to know these things hadn’t changed.
One last nightly task: a bunch of the chaperones had to check rooms between 10:30 and 11 p.m. to make sure they were present. They weren’t kids from the Albany delegation but were randomly assigned. By 11:30 lights out, I was ready for sleep.