I owe an update... I tend to go MIA easily, even on crazy impersonal online things like xanga. 

Well, for one, school is different.  Of course it always is.  Each semester is like a different life with a whole new schedule of classes and new faces and friends.  I'm only taking 16 credit hrs. and I'm not working.  For an overcommitter, that is an accomplishment.  But honestly overcommitting keeps me from getting bored.  I already got bored with my classes this semester in the second week.  Last year I didn't get bored until just before finals week.  I'm taking amazingly cool classes but sitting in a classroom all day at hour and a half intervals is not for me unless we are doing something exciting and creative.     

My Shakespeare class is really cool... and of course any class that Gentry teaches is awesome and I have him for Classical Philosophy and Theology and he's the faculty advisor for Credo.  Besides that, though, I'm pretty uninterested.  Next semester I want to take some cool classes to split up my day, like Ninja skills 101 which teaches soundless jumping and landing abilities.  That would actually come in handy if I was ambushed.  Quoting Shakespeare at people isn't a good defense.

Okay, here is the most saddest news of the semester:  I am not playing South Football.  Instead I am going on the senior high retreat that weekend with the youth group at Faith.  It's going to be a lot cooler than the game and I honestly wouldn't want to trade a minute I get to spend with the youth for a minute of playing football (And I will modestly say that I really, really, really love playing football).  It was a tough decision though b/c I am already incredably disconnected with campus life with my closest friends living off-campus and my lack of desire to get involved in other on-campus activities like open dorms and stuff.

That is really quick update... I left out the rest of the summer, New York, moving, Atlanta, weddings and other crazy things that have happened.  I probably wrote about the least important things but it was what was on my mind at the moment.     

Currently Reading Neil Gaiman's The Sandman and Joseph Campbell: In Search of the Modern Myth By Stephen Rauch see related

This summer has been amazing.  I've been living with Julie Medlin and Bethany Crotts in the coolest house downtown in Columbia.  It's been a blast... we make our own popcorn and watch Indian Bolleywood movies.

I'm still working with the youth group at Faith Pres. I love these kids.  And I am so impressed by the church, also.  After seeing how human leadership can be in the church from Atlanta (and even in the university), I have always been really discouraged to ever work in the church or be a missionary.  But at Faith, the leaders truely fear the Lord, the church body truely encourages one another to reflect Christ's character in word and in deed, and the focus is on God's will and on loving others... not programs and money.  So it has been encouraging to be a leader in the youth ministry at this church and to see how a healthy church functions and reproduces itself and how our missionaries work themselves out of a job. 

I've been studying through John with Serenity and Christina and the coolest lady at my church has been discipling me (Emily Bransford and Jessie Sullivan were the only two girls at CIU that I respected enough and trusted for this position and Bransford just got married and Jessie is still in the DR.)  This has contributed to why the summer has been so awesome... I don't naturally bond with girls well and it is really hard to find common ground... but the Lord has provided awesome women in my life that I connect with well and can grow next to in my Christian walk. 

I still have a huge thirst for someone who I relate with incredably well.  I want to be able to talk to someone without having to explain myself and be able to communicate with the least necessary words.  I want to not have a clashing personality with just at least one person. 

This thirst has strengthened from the challenge at my house with communication.  I don't like being asked 20 irrelevant questions to a small comment that I make that really isn't important and I don't bond through conversation... I bond well through sports and activities and through sharing concepts and ideas.  I know that living with different people challenges you and it's not that I don't enjoy the challenge... I'll embrace any challenge...  I just feel weak and worn out from not having many people to relate with well.  My personality is in complete contrast with those who share my interests and my strengths.  And I'm a thinker... not at all an emotional feeler.  So how am I supposed to relate to girls when I continually offend them with my blunt insensitivity?

 I haven't been able to grasp the hard truths and deep questions in life that I have been learning and studying in my Wisdom Lit. class.  It's seemed like the events in my life have been parallel to the course syllabus. (how crazy is that.)  In my homework, I'm exploring and taking in the question of justice in Job, the search for meaning in life in Ecclesiastes, and the life guiding truths in Proverbs -- and yet at the same time brooding over the same topics in my actual life (well, the small part of it that exists outside of homework).  It's been challenging to have my life reflect what I'm learning at the same time. 

 John Keats, one of my favorite poets, struggled with the paradoxes of life and he expresses it all in his poetry (it reminds me of wisdom lit. but Keats doesn't come to the conclusion of fearing the Lord at the end of his poems)...

All written in May 1819, "Ode to a Nightingale," "Ode on a Grecian Urn," and "Ode on Melancholy" grew out of

a persistent kind of experience which dominated Keats's feelings, attitudes, and thoughts during that time. Each of them is a unique experience, but each of them is also, as it were, a facet of a larger experience. This larger experience is an intense awareness of both the joy and pain, the happiness and the sorrow, of human life. This awareness is feeling and becomes also thought, a kind of brooding as the poet sees them in others and feels them in himself. This awareness is not only feeling; it becomes also thought, a kind of brooding contemplation of the lot of human beings, who must satisfy their desire for happiness in a world where joy and pain are inevitably and inextricably tied together. This union of joy and pain is the fundamental fact of human experience that Keats has observed and accepted as true.

Wright Thomas and Stuart Gerry Brown

Perspective of Italy

There is something about everything in Italy that was beautiful.  I've never wanted to take a picture of my wall or my door, but couldn't take enough of the stone walls and the medival doors.

"To be in a relationship with God is to be loved purely and furiously and a person who thinks himself unlovable cannot be in a relationship with God because He can't accept who God is; a Being that is love.  We learn that we are lovable or unlovable from other people.  That is why God tells us so many times to love eachother."  (Blue Like Jazz 146)