At the Airport

Greetings! I’m Matt Keadle, and I’ll be blogging the 2008 J-term Rural Immersion Class. If you scroll below this post, you can see blog postings from last year’s class. If you scroll above, you can see future postings from me, or maybe, depending on when you’re reading this, postings from some future class that doesn’t even exist yet.

I’m writing this first post from Chicago’s Midway airport, about a 40 minute bus ride from the LSTC campus. In about 90 minutes we’ll be departing for Denver, Colorado, and then we’ll make the drive over to Sidney, Nebraska, where we’ll be staying this year. Here’s a picture of Adam, a fellow Rural Immersion adventurer, and I at Midway airport.



For the last two days we’ve heard about rural life from Rev. Ruth Boettcher, a pastor in rural Nebraska, and Dr. Dennis Gengenbach, a Nebraskan ag producer. It’s been a helpful window into what we’ll be encountering in the coming days. We’ve heard about the challenges Dennis and his fellow ag producers face as they seek to grow food and fuel for the rest of the country (and other countries, too). I have pages and pages of notes and lots of thoughts which are impossible to include here. But in short: Agriculture, we’ve learned, is a highly dynamic field that has changed dramatically in the last few decades, presenting difficult challenges as well as deep joys for its practitioners and their families. We’ve also learned a bit about how rural churches are being revitalized as they have rediscovered anew the gospel of grace for all of God’s people. And I’m sure there will be much more to come soon.

I work at an after-school program when I’m not blogging, and one of the students yesterday was giving me advice about blogging. He also has his own blog. He’s in second grade. He said, “Matt, let me give you a helpful tip. Keep your posts short.” Then he proceeded to give me another helpful tip, which amounted to Googling a fancy program that tracks the number of hits you get on your blog. Did I mention he’s in second grade? Anyway, for now I’ll stick to the first piece of advice and keep it (relatively) short.

Besides, Adam asked me to watch his bag. Hmm, I should probably make sure it’s still there…

Matt