Memory 3

My senior year of college I was dubbed with a new title. The official title is “Senior Resident Assistant”, some call it ‘srah’, while others enjoy its full title of ‘sexy RA’. Now even though it has ‘senior’ in the official title doesn’t necessarily mean that only seniors are ‘SRA’s’…it just so happened that I was a senior, and an SRA. Okay, well what does an SRA do? Well, my rookie year of being an RA, I had a fantabulous SRA paint this picture for me. “It’s like we’re all a soccer team working together. An SRA is like the captain of the team: still completely a part of the team, just with a little more responsibility.” 

Anyways, the best part of anyone’s year [besides Christmas] was ResLife training, hands down. It was a glorious time of year to come together with strangers that you also called co-workers, begin to learn how ridiculously crazy you are, do some crazy skits, learn and re-learn how to use a fire extinguisher, and simply prepare the halls and dorms for the incoming students. Glorious.

Even though training was a solid two weeks, it still didn’t give us enough time to prepare. Every year things were rushed, schedules were crazy, and someone somewhere pulled an all-nighter before the school year even started. As an SRA, there was one thing that I wanted to be sure that we had time for as a staff: a prayer walk through our facilities.

I don’t know about you, but the first time someone ever told me about a prayer walk, I thought they were absolutely nuts, freaky, and super touchy-feely Holy-spirity kinda stuff… but I went along with it and realized woah, they’re not so crazy afterall. A prayer walk is just that: you walk and you pray, at the same time, praying for whatever comes to mind as you go, and physically putting yourself in the presence of the things/concepts you’re praying for.

I wanted to present this opportunity to my fellow workers and insisted that we, as a team, accomplish this task before students moved in. We made time for it. We gathered, and we walked. We prayed, we talked, we shared our hearts, we shared our fears, we encouraged one another, and we asked for protection and growth among the halls that we would be working, and we asked for relationships to be built among the people that would reside in them. Why is this memory so important? It’s the first memory of community being built between the Bittner-Mellinger Reslife staff, and what is life, what is purpose without a community to be a part of in the midst of it?