Around the Horn by Tanner K.

Adrian Beltre. He is not relevant to this post, but he is a great baseball player nonetheless.

It’s October, which means playoff baseball!  I started following the sport when I was eight, and it has been a huge part of my life ever since.  A remarkable trait of baseball is its consistency.  The game has been played in essentially the same form for over a century.  This consistency can be a great comfort in a world that is changing rapidly on a micro and macro level.  Whether I am watching a baseball game on the TV of my childhood home, in a dorm room with friends, or on my laptop in the YAV house in Tucson, it is the same game.
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Occasionally during a baseball game, the players will toss the ball around the horn.  This is when the infielders toss the ball amongst themselves after a strikeout occurred with no men on base.  The primary purpose of the exercise is to keep the fielders loose during the inning.  In honor of playoff baseball, I thought I would use this blog post to go around the horn, and do a brief check in with three components of my life as a Tucson Borderlands Young Adult Volunteer: Faith, Work, and Community.

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Faith

This Sunday, we completed our Southern Arizona church tour!  Our site coordinator, Alison, arranged for us to visit various churches across the Tucson area during our first month and a half as YAVs.  Our house visited Trinity, Southside, St. Mark’s, Holy Way, St. John on the Desert, and Mountain Shadows Presbyterian Church.  The purpose of these visits were to introduce us to the various Presbyterian worshipping communities in the Tucson area, connecting us with the wider faith community we are a part of in this city.  Each church was unique, but the one thing they all shared was radical hospitality.  We introduced ourselves to the congregations, and they responded with warmth, curiosity, and joy.  Now that we are done visiting churches as a group, each YAV will choose their own worshipping community to be a part of.  While I have not made up my mind where I will worship, I know I will be fully welcomed wherever I choose.

The St. Mark’s stop on our Tucson church tour. The church’s pastor, Bart, is standing on the far left.

Work

I am now a month into my work at Community Home Repair Projects of Southern Arizona.  As the seasons change, we have less and less cooler repairs, but our work of fixing roofs, plumbing, flooring, electricity, and everything in between continues.  The cooler weather has transformed my morning commute by bike.  What used to be a hot and sweaty slog is now a cool and breezy ride.  I have also started to split my time between working in the field and in the office.  Two days of the week I am out making repairs, and the other two days I am in the office helping CHRPA’s Development Director, Carrie, with various tasks ranging from grant writing to data entry.  This past thursday, I worked on and submitted my first grant for CHRPA to Wells Fargo!

The dog days of work.

Community

One realization I have  recently come upon is that being a YAV is not merely being a part of one community, it is being a part of many communities.  Over the past month, I have began to form communities with my housemates, co-workers, church congregants, and Tucson residents.  The community that I have the most interactions with is our YAV house.  We have known each other for over two months now.  This means we have a degree of comfort with each other, and can laugh together, dive into deep topics together, and, sometimes, disagree together.  It has been a rewarding experience to get to know Ryan, Miranda, and Dakota, and to hear their fears, realize their strengths, and appreciate their senses of humor.  And yes, I realize I included my wife in that list.  Despite having known her before YAV, this experience has taught me even more about her, mainly just how much strength, resilience and compassion she has within her.

Shhh! Community at Work.

Thank you for going around the horn with me.  As the year goes on, I will try to occasionally do this exercise to continue to give you a sense of the life of a Tucson YAV.

Peace,

​Tanner