Real Love Week

Each hall director at the college we work for is required to organize two of our many yearly events. Nicole and I chose a very easy one for our first event. We put welcome bags together for our Resident Assistants. I think it took us a total of 2 whole hours. Maybe. I think it was more like an hour.

For our other annual event, we chose Real Love week, which is the week of Valentine's day. I don't really know why we chose what we did and why we did it together. There were some events I had absolutely no interest in and the other ones I wanted were already taken. So Real Love it is.

During my first year here, I was in charge of Real Love week. It consisted of me calling a pro-life group in Minnesota and ordering an insert for our school's newspaper. While it was informative in regards to abortion and chastity, I'm not sure how effective and memorable it was. They had ordered the same insert in the past, so I guess it only made sense that we continued it.

Last year, with all the changes that were happening in our department, we didn't do anything for Real Love week. This year, while talking about it, we decided against the insert and create something else instead.

While driving to visit my family last semester, I had the idea of using the passage from 1 Corinthians 13:4-8 as the theme of the week. I threw this idea out to Nicole and she agreed. I thought it would be great to create a booklet and have a short passage from a saint or someone worthwhile to reflect on and a prayer following the passage.

We broke the passage up into 6 sections, with each day dedicated to one section. I think we had more time, more help, and more stamina, we would be doing so much more for this week. Alas, we don't, so we ended up with making a booklet for each student and printing Daily Challenges that will be posted in the residence halls throughout the week.

This is one of my proudest projects since working here. I loved working on it. I especially loved it because it goes to the heart of what real love is. I am anti-sap. The only reason why I like Valentine's day is because chocolate is half off on Feb. 15, and it's also a sign that my birthday is less than 10 days away. This was a great project for me to work on, and I pray that each and every single person who reads the booklet will get the one message we are trying to send: God loves you.

Real Love week starts tomorrow, so I thought it would be great to post the passages, prayers, and challenges we put together on this blog.