All of my college girls on Starlite’s leadership team are back in town as of yesterday, so we naturally had a meeting last night to go over some general things for the semester.  We’re in the middle of volunteer recruitment (which lasts a little over a week for us), so we have a lot to do this week ranging from hosting our annual Ice Cream Social to starting the background check process on all of the new volunteers.

Our real reason for meeting last night was to decide on a list of things that each member of our leadership team (including Allie and myself) will commit to this semester.  We have always had a list of guidelines that we follow that are pretty rigid.  For example, one choice we have asked our leaders and volunteers to make is to not drink any form of alcohol at any time — period (this should be a non-issue for our group that is under 21, but we do have several volunteers and leaders who are 21 or older).  We’re not interested in discussing whether drinking is necessarily wrong for Christians — we just simply don’t want to do it in front of young girls that we’re mentoring.  There are several other things that go with that list, but we decided to add a few more to it last night.

We spent a lot of time talking about how we want to come to Starlite as whole people; after all, the more “whole” we are individually, the more “whole” our team will be.  So we identified 11 different areas that we want to bring excellence to in our lives over the course of the next semester.  I was so proud to listen to the girls bring up topics that they struggle with and work out solutions to it among themselves while Allie and I listened in (and occasionally chimed in, of course).

Some of the things we decided on are what you’d expect: getting enough sleep at night (remember, we use college-aged volunteers); engaging in daily Bible reading and prayer; establishing and communicating with an accountability partner on a regular basis.

Some of what we chose surprised all of us, I think.  One of our girls mentioned that she felt like we need to make a concentrated effort to spend 30 minutes a week communicating with a member of our families that we don’t normally talk to on a daily basis.  We also talked about writing in our personal journals at least once a week and making sure that fruits and veggies — as well as plenty of water — are in our daily routines.

I pulled rank as the only person who is absolutely out of school (Allie’s finishing her masters’ degree and all the other girls are still undergrad) and said that I expected them to be at class regularly and to turn in all assignments.  They were still groaning when I threw down the second part of the gauntlet: I also expect to hear that they turned in their papers and assignments on time.

Rockin’ the leader high heels even when they aren’t popular, ya’ll. 

The funniest part of the evening came when one girl mentioned that we probably needed to have some type of commitment regarding our dating relationships, specifically the physical part of those relationships.  After quite a lively discussion, they agreed that anything from the neck to the knees should never be involved in anything (there’s more to this guideline, of course, but you get the drift).  Andi, one of our girls who was taking notes, kept struggling with how to write that guideline down and finally decided to just list it as the “hehehe factor” due to the giggles that kept erupting every time someone said “neck to knees, neck to knees!”  We’re available for purity speech bookings, you know — “Avoiding the HeHeHe one date at a time.”

Now I’ve just got to figure out how to explain all this to Imaginary Boyfriend.