Connor Filkins ’16 
(B.A. Philosophy and Religion) spent the summer traveling across the country as a Materials Manager for Group Mission Trips. He checked in with the Alumni Office recently to share a little bit about this experience.
To say I have been lucky is an understatement. In the last two years, I have traveled nearly the entire country. Whenever I tell the stories of my summer job experiences, they sound too good to be true— even to me. I’ve been paid to travel. I’ve driven across the deserts of the Navajo Nation. I’ve stood in awe of the Rocky Mountains, and hiked their snowy peaks.
I’ve gotten lost in the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee and drank in the honky-tonks of Nashville. I’ve fished the inlets of South Carolina and enjoyed hot summer days on a Naval Reserve base in West Virginia. All these places and more, all the stories I can tell, and all the friends I have made; I deserve none of it but am grateful for it all.
“You will never be completely at home again. Because part of your heart will always be elsewhere. That is the price you pay for the richness of loving and knowing people in more than one place” – Miriam Adeney
Home is a relative term to me now. I live in St. Louis. My family lives in Connecticut. My friends are all over. I haven’t spent more than a month sleeping under the same roof in a single state in over two years. I think now, home is not in a single place, but wherever love resides. For me, I can find home across the country. And love truly resides with my friends I’ve made at Albertus. 
When he is not traveling, Connor is working on a mission project with his home church, First Congressional Church, Wallingford. Their goal is to coordinate over 400 volunteers from across the country to perform repairs in 60 homes in the Wallingford community at no cost to the homeowners. For this effort, he was recently named a Hometown Hero by the Hartford Courant.
He is enrolled in the Eden Theological Seminary school in Webster Grove, Mo., and plans to work as a parish youth minister.