Matt Hall has just been hired to fill the position of Church Administrator at University Lutheran. One of Matt’s many responsibilities will be to compose and send out this email every week. Here’s a little bit about Matt so that you can get to know him a little better and how he will be serving University Lutheran and God through his work here.
1. Just to get things started, tell us a little bit about yourself – where you are from and where you’re headed.
I am 19 years old, born and raised in Tallahassee. I attended Chiles High School, currently attend TCC and plan to attain my Associate in Arts and transfer to FSU where I will major in Economics. I am still pondering what field I want to work in long term, so these next few years are where I’m trying to realize and decide what I want to do with my life.
2. One of the stories that the search committee really liked that you told was the thing about the shampoo at the Shelter, can you tell us about what you did there?
I worked at the Renaissance Community Center for the summer of my junior year. What they do is help the people living at The Shelter (by providing showers, housing, job opportunities, etc.). For the showers they were reliant on people donating little hotel shampoo bottles, so I came up with the idea of just getting full bottles of shampoo and those cheap Dixie cups and administering it out, which would make it easier to get the supplies donated and it also worked out that it allowed people to donate full tubes of toothpaste as opposed to mini-versions of that as well.
If someone brought by a Diet Coke or a Sprite, I would be greatly appreciative.
Going back to my time at the Renaissance Center, going into my time there my outlook towards people was much different. I was much more of a selfish teen then. After my time working with the less fortunate I came to realize just how much happiness helping people brings to them and you. The folks living at The Shelter have to put up with a lot of stuff (the living conditions, lack of safety, hunger, etc.) if there’s a group of people who have a right to feel down about things and mad at the world about where they’ve been put in life they are in it, and yet a lot of them were the nicest people I’ve ever met, and any help we could give them brought a smile to their face. So for me, this was the perfect real world example of a group of Christians (through groups like ECHO and Lutheran Social Services) making the world better by spreading the Love of God to our fellow man.
