“Forever is the most dizzying word in the English language. The idea of staying in one place forever was like standing at the border of a foreign country, peering over the fence and trying to imagine what life might be like on the other side, and life on the other side was frankly unimaginable.” This is Lilia’s thought, from the novel Last Night in Montreal. In that moment her father, after being on the run with her for nearly her whole life, has finally settled down and invited her to join him. She enjoys the quiet life at first, living in a house with a family and routine, but finds that she can’t stomach the idea of forever in the same place. So she leaves them. Most of us have not traveled so much as Lilia, that we, as she puts it, “don’t know how to stay.” But we do […]

Are all three of you really going to fit in one office? Where is the printer in suite 187? Are any of the conference rooms still available? And most importantly—are we really going to let all those nice desk chairs get thrown away just because we don’t have anywhere to put them while the office is being remodeled? This was the chaos that greeted me when I started my internship at Lutheran Social Services of Illinois (or LSSI), but despite the fact that everyone was moving offices the very week I started there, my supervisor and the rest of the staff still made time to welcome me onto the team and make sure I had a place in the midst of all the confusion. My very first day, my supervisor made a point to introduce me to as many people as possible, then took me out to lunch with two […]