The Runza Experience!

Today began with breakfast provided by Pastor John Sipf. After a wonderful breakfast, we listened to Pastors John Sipf and Andrew Chavanak, tell us about the difficulties of rural ministry. John spoke especially about the intricacies of two-point parish ministry. Then we received a tour of Pastor John's parsonage, and heard about what it is like to work with a council trying to make changes to a parsonage.

Then it was time to leave for text study. We drove down to St. Thomas, the local episcopal church. Here we got to meet many of the local church leaders and participate in the weekly, ecumenical, clergy text study. This gave us an opportunity to begin to see how important ecumenical partnerships can be to rural ministers.

After text study, it was time for another meal. We headed to the local Runzas, where Zak and I had our first experience with a Runza. After hearing countless stories of Runzas, we were pleased to finally have our own Runza and frings. After yet another delicious meal and wonderful conversation, we were ready to move on.

We met up with Richard Martin, the head of the chamber of commerce in Falls city. He spoke with us for an hour and a half about working with the chamber of commerce in a rural community. It gave a great chance to learn about commerce in rural settings.

We got a short tour of Falls City, seeing both the new medical center and the library. After that we headed for Rulo. From there, we headed over the river into Missouri and made our way to Big Lake, here we were able to survey the damage from the flood last year. As we drove through Big Lake, population 274 pre-flood, our hearts began to break for all those affected by last years flood. Five miles from the river, we could see water lines eight-foot tall on the trees and houses. While we had been hearing stories of the flood from those affected, we did not understand what we heard until we saw what could have been mistaken as the Indiana Dunes in the middle of fields. Our hearts and prayers go out to those who have been, and continue to try to put their lives back together after they were devastated by the 2011 flood.

After finishing our surveying of the land we headed back to the library in Falls City to hear the story of how pastor spouses deal with first calls, and to debrief on our day. After we leave the library, we will be going to dinner somewhere in the city, and hopefully ending the evening at the local bowling alley.

Blessings from Nebraska,

~Josh