Acts2 Life Hacks: Covo Ministry’s Possible, with a little help
If you’ve been on the Acts2 Network website, you might’ve seen the rough schedule for our covocational ministers. Daytime is for their day job, and all other times are for ministry. People have asked, how is that possible?! With a strong implication that it’s not, or that only super-human people can do this. I can relate with that sentiment. Along with many of our team members, (see their stories on our stories webpage,) I grew up with pretty much everything provided, so all I needed to do was study. When I arrived at college, I had never even fried an egg. Never would I imagine living life as a mom of 2 children, working as a lawyer with a pretty long commute and volunteering my time after work for ministry — including leading life groups, cooking for people, holding different events and Bible studies. During college, I scheduled my classes for afternoons so that I could sleep in every day. I was not a diligent person. Most of my time growing up and in college was spent reading novels — which seems to be paying off now, because I can write a blog, but it didn’t provide life skills.
When I fell in love with the picture of a purposeful life, loving people, sharing the gospel of Jesus that saved me and trying to disciple others while in a close community, I might’ve had the heart and intentions, but did not have the skills to live it out. I think this is challenging for anyone. We all need help from one another. And over the years, I got a lot of help! I was helped in everything from cleaning my home to shopping for and cooking a meal, basic kitchen skills. I love kids, and got to watch my mentors’ children before I had my own. So even though I didn’t grow up with young children around me, I learned how to take care of babies and toddlers and create a nice but structured environment for kids; get them to bed, put away their things, get things ready to leave the house. I also got concrete help from friends and helped friends with all of these things. I made many, many mistakes and learned from them — including buying wrong groceries, neglecting to buy key ingredients when we were all at a picnic on Angel Island (with no stores nearby), getting extremely lost while I had all the food for an outing and so making people wait, putting inedible things into a really easy-to-make instant soup. Everyone makes mistakes, though I feel I’ve made more than most. But over time, I grew; and now, I think I can pass as a decently diligent mentor.
Also, over time, our church has created some ways of teaching one another tips and tricks from those who are better at these things. We’ve tried to maintain a recipe website, but haven’t been quite successful at maintaining it yet. So that’s to come later. But for now, we have these helpful videos for life hacks which Acts2 team members have found useful over the years:
A lot of it involves cooking and cleaning, because how can you have capacity to love other people if you feel frazzled and chaotic? These tips are all designed to help us feel less harried, more available, and more pleasant for those around us, who we want to love (friends, family, ministry teams.) Hopefully we’ll develop some more how-to’s in time, but for now, I wanted to share some of what we have.
