Before I get too far into this, I should probably back up just a little bit. Throughout my time at Loras, I would so often hear different people talk about teaching this program called "Totus Tuus." I was intrigued as I had helped with VBS growing up and always loved it. There was just one problem, the Archdiocese of Dubuque didn't have the program and I was unsure about traveling to teach for another Diocese. Well, as the Holy Spirit would have it, I heard that Totus Tuus was coming to the Archdiocese in the summer of 2015 which was perfect timing for me. I didn't already have a job and I knew what I was going to do in the fall, but my summer was wide open. After a bit of prayer and discernment that included talking to previous TT teachers, I decided to apply. After the application was turned in, I was later contacted for an interview. By this point, I was sure I was being called to teach, but I was still nervous about the interview. I knew a lot of the interviewers which should have made me less nervous, but instead made me more nervous. To make a long story short, I was hired along with another young woman and 2 seminarians to lead/teach the inaugural summer of Totus Tuus for the Archdiocese of Dubuque. I had no idea what I was actually getting myself into, but it was the beginning of the hardest summer I've ever loved.
I'll skip most of training, but it was intense. We traveled 9 something hours to Witchita, Kansas for training and arrived at some odd hour in the morning. We slept a couple of hours before starting a crazy week we dubbed "part retreat, part bootcamp." After training, we had about a week to relax and finish preparing lessons before we headed out on our "mission."
To give you a brief idea of what the schedule was like, most weeks the day program started at 9 or 9:30 and we often arrived an hour to an hour and a half early to pray, set up and get things ready. The program ran until 2:30 or 3, and we usually spend 30-45 minutes cleaning and preparing for the next day. After that we would have just a short amount of free time before heading to a family's house for dinner. After dinner, we headed back to the church/school for the evening program which usually started at 7:30 and ran until 9. After the evening program, we often hung around with the kids for a while before heading back to our host family houses and (showering?) hitting the hay to do it all again the next day. Needless to say, the days were exhausting, but we somehow managed to be (at least somewhat) refreshed for the next day. There are a lot of details about the actual program that I'm leaving out because of time (nobody wants to spend a half hour reading a blog...), but if you're interested, let me know and I'd be happy to tell you more!
Ok, now that you've heard about the interview process, training, and the program itself, let's get to the interesting part...how it affected me. Let me remind you, going in, I thought I had an idea of what it would look like, but I quickly found out that I had no idea what I was doing. That being said, I learned a lot that summer (the specifics would be a whole other blog post). I can't really pinpoint one or two things that really changed me that summer; but rather the summer as a whole changed me. I was challenged in so many ways and learned that it's ok to step outside your comfort zone. In fact, you have to step outside your comfort zone if you want to learn and grow. I learned things and grew in ways that will continue to affect me for the rest of my life. The biggest change was allowing myself to be "Totus Tuus;" to let go of everything I could and to let God be in control. I mean, He's always in control, but from that summer on, I have made a conscious effort to let go of the things I can't control and to use His wisdom and help in discerning the things I can control. I don't want to say that I'm great at doing this all of the time, because I'm definitely not, but it has changed my life dramatically for the better. Abandoning yourself into the control of another is not an easy thing to do, but it's something that I've learned is so beneficial and has really changed my life. My hope is that I touched one teammate, one student, one parent, one helper, just one person in my summer teaching Totus Tuus and that they will in turn use what they learned to touch others. Who would have thought that something that started as a summer job would have changed my life?
P.S. Thanks for hanging on for so long... sometimes I ramble. If anybody wants to know more about my Totus Tuus experience, please don't hesitate to comment or contact me directly.
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