Heather Wildrick

History/Resume

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Why I am a Youth Minister

First, I took this great class in college entitled “Sending Good Teens to Hades 101” and I figured it qualified me; it’d be a shame to let all that book learnin’ to go to waste.  Also, I guess it has something to do with the fact that I’m the oldest girl in a family of 6 kids, with a 17-year difference between my oldest brother and youngest sister.  So for as long as I can remember I was encouraged by my parents and every swooning grandparent to be the “big girl” in the family (AKA: Free Babysitter) and at least pretend to appreciate the far cuter and sassier younger siblings who were continuously running around underfoot and breaking all my big girl toys.  I guess one day it all finally sunk in, and after some therapy I can now officially be trusted not to pinch or kick little children anymore when they get near my stuff – sometimes I even think they’re cute.  But in youth ministry I’ve also found that the older, teenage set can be infinitely more interesting than the little ones.  Teens are so terrifically cheeky, and they keep things very exciting in the office. 

About Me

Since you’ve already read the above info, I’m not sure how wise it is to tell you any more information, lest you try to look up my family members to see if it’s really possible that they could be as weird as I am.  That said, maybe I can mediate the damage by making this section appear as normal as possible.

I went to McLean H.S., and McLean, VA was actually the only place we lived for more than 4 years consecutively at a time.  When I was a child we moved constantly, and I’ve also lived in IL, NE, CO, NY, NC, TX, PA, AZ, IA, etc., sometimes moving once or twice within these states as well.  My only friends growing up were a series of hamsters that my mother tolerated with the understanding that these really were my only friends.  The coolest part about friends like these is that with family guidance they often lived unnaturally long lives . . . after about three years they would just suddenly start to go downhill and then fall (as my parents termed it) into a “deep sleep” . . . miraculously to wake up a few days later, young again, with entirely different fur patterns, colors and personalities.  Pretty amazing stuff.  I should also add in all honesty that I did have a few human friends as well, but most of them thought it best to become part of other groups once they found that my idea of a play date was to dissect any dead birds we could find in the lawn with my mother’s hedge clippers.

In junior high I finally found my first human bff.  Her name was Alexandra and we hit it off right away when she invited me over to her house to start an insect-collecting club.  We never could manage to get anyone else to join the club, but it was a great success nonetheless.  Her parents were naturalists, so her whole house was teeming with all sorts of exotic animals, aquariums, bugs, etc.  It was a wonderland.  They used to invite me over all the time for dinners of squirrel fried in a special sauce – a delicacy that Alexandra’s father had often picked off the road on his way home from work.