But to Minister...

“Not to be ministered unto, but to minister.” - Mark 10:42 (& Martha Berry)

It’s graduation day. !!!

A little over four years ago, before I was even a Berry student, I had to write a scholarship essay on the importance of an integrated education of the head, the heart, and the hands, and then I had to choose the most critical one. I’m pretty sure I used every buzz word in the book (e.g. - passion, character, integrity, commitment. Blah.), and afterward I remember gathering in the hallway of the Cook building with other prospective students. We all came to the obvious conclusion that if you didn’t choose the heart as the most important, then you were surely out of consideration for the scholarship.

Well, today, four years later, I’m fully bought-in to the concept of the head, the heart, and the hands. And today it’s only appropriate for me to respond to that same scholarship essay prompt, except this isn’t an essay because that’s boring and repetitive and you didn’t sign up to read an essay here. So here’s a small taste of the big impact this school continues to have on me.

The Head

You’d think this one is pretty self-explanatory. Wrong. Very wrong, especially if you go to a private liberal arts college that believes in a well-rounded education. That entails taking classes like Intro to Agricultural Science, Hispanic Literary Analysis, and Theatre, in which I made a B+, but that’s not the point of this story (okay but really, who makes a B+ in theatre?).

One of my favorite parts about Berry is that it connects students to some very important people. By the grace of God (and only the grace of God) I found myself sitting on committees with athletic directors, faculty liaisons, chiefs of staffs, and university presidents. I found myself at the NCAA Headquarters in Indianapolis, an entrepreneurship conference in Chattanooga, and on seemingly every corner of our 27,000 acre campus.

What do all these things have in common? They made me think. And think hard. And think from perspectives I’d never thought about. The chance to learn from these people and in these places is absolutely humbling. It’s also very intimidating, and really taught me how to hold back tears sitting in a board room—still working on that one, though!

The Heart

Part of the reason I love Berry is because I love the people (and dog!!) I lived with. The four of us—Eveline, Emma, Jetta, and myself—spent our senior year in one suite in Thomas Berry Hall (despite sharing our entire lives with each other, we don’t have a single picture together).

Eveline and I were randomly assigned freshman year, when the first communication we had was on move-in day when I looked in her van and said “Um, I think you’re my roommate!” We’ve been inseparable ever since, taking day trips to Whole Foods and road trips to Charleston, with many more places left to visit on our bucket list. I still can’t believe I survived 4 years living with a Michigan fan (go bucks) who blends spinach in her smoothies (our only two disagreements ever).

Emma lived across the hall from us freshman year, and Jetta came along sophomore year. We were all fast friends who stayed friends and then joined up again senior year. Emma brings a spunkiness to life that I didn’t know I needed, but now I can’t live without. And Jetta brings lots of reasons for study breaks and trips to the freezer for her favorite ice cube snack, or “crunch water”.

They say you are who you hang out with, and if I’m half the woman these two are, then Berry did it’s job working on my heart.

The Hands

Berry is built on the philosophy of servant leadership (AKA the only type of leadership). I’ll just be honest, I’m a really bad servant leader. You can ask any individual in the picture above, and they can probably confirm that, because I just really like taking care of me! I mean, who doesn’t?

HOWEVER, I’m learning! I’m learning the impact of a leader taking on work for the good of the team; how a leader should never ask anything of her followers that she wouldn’t do herself. The golf team could also confirm this, as they were my guinea pigs for DiSC testing, Myers-Briggs personality assessing, and core values activities (shoutout to y’all for putting up with that).

My college golf team gave me a chance to learn from, lead, and lift others through service. This team is also probably ready to get rid of me after four years of nonstop enthusiasm and tone-deaf bus singing, but not so fast…

…because in the fall I’m headed back to Berry!

I’m under the impression that God knew exactly what I needed—He knew I wasn’t ready to say a virtual goodbye to the place that now lives in my head, my heart, and my hands. So he gave me a graduate assistantship in the Campbell School of Business. !!!

I am blessed beyond measure, for the four years that end today and the next two that start.

Now let me tell you about this cake!

This cake was one of the most challenging cakes I’ve ever made. Not because anything was terribly difficult to create, but because it’s a cake that should be shared with friends and family, should be the centerpiece of the cake table I’ve dreamt about, and should be celebrating one of the happiest milestones life has to offer.

But instead, all 14.4 pounds of it are sitting in my family’s fridge (and we can’t complain, because we get to have a piece of cake every day!). What makes this cake so special is the four years it took to make it: living under the Ford building skyline, living by the motto, competing for our institutional and athletic logos, and, of course, constantly yielding to the masses of deer across campus. Let’s be honest, they really run this place.

Friends, I’m thinking of you all as I’m digging into this cake. Happy graduation day, class of 2020!

Southern Living: Villa Rica Edition

So, Redneck Yacht Club, huh? Welcome to our life in Georgia! 

Jorie, circa 2000, ready for lake life. Obviously.

Thirteen trips to-and-from Ohio later, we found our house on a tiny lake in West Georgia. It wasn’t that easy, however, because in those 13 trips we worked with four realtors in multiple cities and looked at a minimum of 85 houses. Yes, we have high standards, but we also wanted a lake house (sounds a lot more glamourous than it actually is…we’re not talking about the Taj Mahal here!), and lake houses in Georgia are all…unique, to say the least.

The reasoning for a lake house? My mom swore she wouldn’t become my dad’s hobby in retirement; in an effort to preserve our family, we all needed built-in activities and had been accustomed to life on water. And now that I’ve lived on water, there’s no turning back. Which is not ideal for my soon-to-be post-graduate budget. 

The Hodapp’s, June 2016. The happiest day of all of our lives, since my high school graduation meant I would FINALLY stop complaining about high school.

In a tiny little southern town called Villa Rica (for Spanish speakers, or even those who know a little bit about the language, in Georgia it’s not pronounced Vee-ya Ree-ca. It’s vil-la rick-uh. Villa Rica. You got it, now just add in some southern twang and slow your speed down, and you’d fit right in with the locals). After some nauseous driving through the backwoods of Georgia, we made our last trip as guests and would return as Georgia residents in just a few short months. 

In June of 2016, I’d just graduated high school (hallelujah), and was swamped with my last cake orders in Ohio before the move. This period of my life was pretty much a blur as graduation day had become the happiest day of my life up to this point. We spent that summer back and forth from Ohio moving our belongings 10 hours south to a neighborhood where we could count on zero hands the people we knew, and to a city where they drop a golden nugget on New Year’s Eve in the town square. Not kidding. 

This is truly what dreams are made of.

On June 21st, 2016, a few days before my college orientation, we closed on our new house. We planned to stay there for a few days until heading to Berry for SOAR, so we brought some essentials with us. You know, things like air mattresses, beach chairs, a folding table, clothes, golf clubs, my Kitchenaid mixer, and some snacks.

Our first dinner at our new house, June 2016. Leave it to the Italians to christen the kitchen with boxed spaghetti and jarred tomato sauce. The definition of gourmet.

Well, bringing kitchen utensils, for one, would have been a great idea. Curtains also would have been a good idea. And maybe lamps, shower supplies, and cleaning products would have all been good ideas. But no, we were ready to sit on the dock and drink room-temperature bottled water for the next few days. Priorities, right?

This was our pantry upon arrival. Stocked with nutrients. At least we wouldn’t totally starve.

My mom and I lived like nomads for an entire summer while my dad kept working in Ohio. I promise, we are two very intelligent women, but sometimes we just look at each other and shake our heads like, “what in the world were we thinking?!” 

Seriously, we had no curtains on the back of our house, which is 95% windows and faces a lake with lots of activity during all hours. 

We grocery-shopped at the local Walmart and bought a can of beans for tacos and couldn’t use it because we didn’t think to get a can opener. 

We lived out of a travel-size cooler because the house came without a refrigerator—and we didn’t even think to go buy one, fully knowing that we would eventually make that purchase so we could, you know, live there. So we continued eating non-refrigerated and non-canned food off and on for three months.

Somehow, we survived, and as soon as my dad made the trip down, he looked in a closet, found some curtains, and held them up to us and asked the simple question, “why didn’t you hang these up?” Listen people, there’s no manual on how to move into a new house. But my mom and I lived as though we were stranded with no knowledge of how to use Command Hooks to avoid waking up and going to bed according to the sun’s schedule, not to mention avoiding all back-lit windows when it got dark and people could see in. Needless to say, we make a great pair, but we really need my dad if we actually want to survive for any length of time with any sense of logic or rationality.

Jorie + Dad, summer 2018. It took us another 2 years to realize we could hang curtains in my room, too, not just the upstairs. We consider ourselves a family of geniuses.

That summer may have been a blur, but it’s one I wouldn’t trade for the world. Little did I know, my life in Villa Rica hadn’t even begun yet, and my college life in Rome would be unlike anything I could imagine in a sleepy southern berg.

That’s all for this time! Excuse me while I go sit on our deck—in a real chair, around a real table—and eat some pasta that was fixed with more than one communal utensil.

Y’all Come Back, Now!
jorie

**Please note, I poke fun at Villa Rica and its southern culture because I truly love it. A humble little spot in West Georgia has unsuspectingly become home, at least for the last three years and a few/many more to come. It’s also rumored that I myself have developed a bit of an accent…if you want to hear the thick of my southern draw, just make me mad, and you’ll get an earful, bless your heart!

Berry What?!

Berry College—like the fruit—is where I had my sights set. And *spoiler* it’s the name that’s about to be on my diploma this spring! 

Jorie, circa 1998, ready for an All-American lifestyle (read ‘til the end to see why this American flag picture is relevant!).

Remember that 27-minute phone call I had with the golf coach in the last post? I think you need to know the backstory, because it’s wild. That is all.

In the fall of 2015 (during my senior year of high school), Coach was driving the women’s team to their tournament in Destin, Florida, when my initial email came through on his phone. He miraculously had a player in the van from Ohio, so he showed her my email. She didn’t know me directly, but sent my name to her former teammate who was still in high school in Ohio. Turns out, we’d been paired together in a tournament that summer. Talk about a small world.

Jorie + Mom, 2020. We’d end up making thirteen (13) trips back and forth from Ohio to Georgia between college-shopping and home-buying. Needless to say, we make a pretty good travel pair. And we’re pretty good at finding random beaches to visit everywhere we go.

That kind of sounds like one of those “my sister’s-cousin’s-neighbor’s-great-granddaughter knows-a-guy-who-knows-a-guy” stories, and that’s actually not too far from the truth. The chances of the Berry College golf team having a player from Ohio were slim-to-none, but there she sat in the van, about to help me out tremendously.

After a decent recommendation from that teammate-of-a-teammate, the next week Coach Farrer drove 9 hours to watch me play a few holes in the state championships, and the next weekend I visited Berry for the first time with my mom.

At this point it really wasn’t that long ago that I thought Berry College was a tenant in a strip mall along I-75 in a forgotten middle-of-America zip code. As my first step on campus revealed, Berry was, in fact, not a strip mall, but…

THE MOST BEAUTIFUL PLACE I’D EVER SEEN.

I mean, it has a castle. Come on.

Coach proceeded to spend 8 hours showing my mom and I around campus—the castle, the water wheel, mountain campus, the chapel, the gym, both golf courses and practice facilities, the dining hall, and a little bit of Rome community. There was nothing I didn’t love, and the thought of spending four years in this fairytale setting made it reallyyyy hard to finish out the next few months of high school, and in the dead of winter nonetheless.

Berry College. Need I say more? Except for the fact that yes, those are people canoeing in the reflection pond.

This time the 10-hour trip through farmland and cornfields back to Ohio didn’t seem as long. My mom and I left campus with a little more hope than the previous trips, and our heads spinning with the excitement of finding my home at Berry. We could see our years of planning finally coming together during a time when we really started to question everything we were giving up for a little sunshine and a few rounds of golf.

I regularly joke about my parents following me to college because—who does that?! But when you look at the situation as a whole, God aligned every part of the process that made the decision almost a no-brainer. I was an only child with parents nearing retirement, with no siblings, or even pets, to hold us in Ohio. The weather really was a driving factor, and once all of us got on board with the thought of southern living, everything seemed to fall into place, but not without a lot of prayer and too many setbacks to count. We may be a family of three, but I think we’re a family of three hoarders. Literally. U-Haul almost ran out of moving trucks for all our stuff (and that was after 26 SUV loads of stuff donated to the thrift store).

Please, no judgments.

You may be wondering what this all has to do with baking cakes. Well, without me, there are no cakes to be baked. So basically I’ve roped you into reading my whole life story. But if you’ve made it this far—congratulations, by the way—you’re probably not going to stop now. Especially when I tell you I ran a bakery out of a college dorm room (which I wouldn’t recommend for many reasons, but hey, you can’t re-write history).

In summary, I found where I wanted to go to school, was offered a spot on the golf team, and had narrowed our home-buying radius significantly to a three-hour circle around Mount Berry, Georgia. 

You’ll want to stay tuned to hear about the tiny little town we settled in. Let’s just say it may be the polar opposite of the lifestyle we’d grown accustomed to in Ohio. But there’s no doubt it encompasses the heart of southern hospitality.  It’s definitely not lacking in the pickup truck, cowboy boot, or American flag categories either (maybe my patriotic baby picture foreshadowed all this?).Before I publish the next part of the story, I encourage you to watch this music video of “Redneck Yacht Club” to get an idea of my family’s current living situation. Just know that it’s spot on, and we absolutely love it.

See y’all next time!

jorie

Bird Lady Adventures

So you probably think I graduated from high school, opened a bakery storefront in a quaint southern town, and am making a killer profit right about now.

Jorie & Grandpa, circa 2001, probably making the infamous Buckwheat Pancakes I so dearly despised as a 4-year-old (love you, grandpa, but why you made me eat buckwheat pancakes is beyond me).

Wrong. Very wrong. Though that would have been a dream come true, a lot of other factors were involved. Namely, remember those horrid winters I mentioned a while ago? Yeah, never living through one of those again, or at least for the next four years. Take the desire to move anywhere south of the Mason-Dixon Line and the advice from my parents to get a college degree because, “What if you’re thirty and never want to bake another cake again? Then what do you fall back on?”, and you have a very good point. Plus, I wanted to fulfill my goal to play college golf. 

So, college it was. 

Now this part of the story really isn’t made up. If you need an example of God’s handiwork in modern times, keep reading…

“Mom, Dad, I’m not staying in Ohio after I graduate. I’m going south. You can come visit me, or you can come with me, but I’m getting out of this place,” said twelve-year-old me. 

Yeah, right. What parents are going to listen to their only kid, let alone actually go along with her idea?

For the record: I’m keenly aware of the “Only-Child Syndrome.” It’s a real thing. And I praise God daily for giving me parents who worked tirelessly to make sure no one could tell I’m an only child (I still don’t like sharing, but at least I know how to do it!). 

As you may know, my parents listened to me. Clearly, I didn’t fully think through my ultimatum, because they actually came with me to college.

Okay, so maybe they didn’t actually follow me to college, but it makes for a great story. At one point it was suggested that my mom get a job in Rome. On campus. Like where I live. And occasionally she still threatens me with that proposal. Basically, I just gave the three of us an excuse to escape the eight months of snow that made us all miserable.

After we decided that we were all packing up and moving, we started counting down our move by winters— “only five more of these until we’re gone!”  And for those next five winters, we entertained ourselves on Zillow looking up houses anywhere from Alabama to North Carolina. 

Just to add in another major life event, I still had to find somewhere to go to college, and wherever that would be would decide (relatively) where we would buy a house. My search was rather slim, knowing I wanted a smaller, private Christian school where I had a shot at playing on the golf team. Shouldn’t be too difficult, I thought, which was a rather naive thought considering we had absolutely no idea where to look, or how to call coaches, or what schools even existed that fit all of my criteria. Oh, and throw in finding a house within three hours of that unknown school *and* my parents retiring and leaving the house my grandpa built…should be a piece of cake! 

Hyperventilating yet? Because I most definitely was.

Yeah, it was a piece of cake alright. One of those hockey-puck-grit-cakes I used to make. But, if there’s one thing I learned: never doubt God. He’s literally the only explanation for how all those moving parts worked—and worked successfully—to get us to Georgia.

Everyone asks, “how did you find Berry College from Dublin, Ohio?” Because in Dublin, Berry College sounded like one of those chain universities in a strip mall parking lot. So, here’s the answer to that question that requires a little imagination and a lot of faith:

My smart grandparents, who live half the year in Ohio and the colder half in Florida, happened to be on vacation in Pennsylvania. This isn’t relative to the story, but I think it should be known that they were on a bird-watching trip. If you know my golf-playing, grocery-store-owning, practical-minded grandpa, you know this probably wasn’t his idea (considering he hates birds), but he agreed to go anyway. Nonetheless, they were on a quest to find the Roseate Spoonbill, or something like that.

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

Please enjoy the above gallery of pictures with my grandpa and I! Eight pictures don’t nearly do justice to the impact he’s had on my life, my golf game (still working on the three-putting thing), and my business.

In the lobby of their bed and breakfast, they met a lady who, to this day, we’re not entirely sure actually exists. She pulled a chair up to their breakfast table (there’s always one of those people at those kind of places) and started making conversation.

Because of my recent local celebrity baker status, the subject naturally turned to me (or maybe because I had visited 12 schools, liked none of them, and was frantically trying to find a place to go after graduation; but I like to think the conversation turned to me because I’m a celebrity). “Our granddaughter really wants to play college golf in the south, but she’s not having much luck finding a school,” they explained.

The frail, middle-aged woman urged them to pass along the name Berry College. It’s a school in Rome, Georgia, that is globally known for its nest of bald eagles.

Jorie & Coach, May 2018 at the DIII Women’s Golf National Championships. A sneak peek of why Berry is the best decision I ever made—or, rather, how Berry is the best decision ever made for me.

How fitting.

Berry College, you ask? Like the fruit? Yes, that one! My chances of playing college golf were quickly shrinking, so out of curiosity and a little desperation, I called the coach at Berry College and talked to him for 27 minutes on the phone. If you know me, you know that one phone call minute feels like 3 regular minutes, and actually enjoying a phone call is a modern-day miracle. I hung up, knowing I’d go there, without ever having seen the campus or the school’s website come up in any of my hundreds of Google searches. 

I’ll leave you wondering about where the bird lady adventures lead, and how this all connects to my passion for baking. I promise, it’ll all come together! But I’m telling you, there’s no other explanation for my travels besides the Good Lord Himself pulling it together. I mean, who would’ve thought I’d end up at Berry College—and love it, by the way!

Talk soon!
jorie