As I think on how that friendship has changed over the past year really there have been hard times as well as changed I’ve had to adjust to; the hardest being not getting to talk or hear from her nearly as much. Now don’t get me wrong, we’re just friends but being thousands of miles away makes it harder to stay in touch when you rely mostly on email. One of the nice changes though is the fact that as odd as it may seem, we’ve partially gone to snail mail. There’s something special about getting letters from her. I get one from her typically every week. As I look back on the past year, I’m amazed at the things that have happened. I started thinking recently, as recently as Sunday night (Easter Sunday) what did I ever do to deserve such a friendship you know? What happened that allowed me to meet this girl and get to know her as well as I do? And what caused her to be more open to me than she is to her counselor? I know it’s all a God thing but the question is what role did I play in this if any? I will be perfectly honest with you; we have grown to really love each other. I was looking at some of our emails from the last almost year and looking at how we sign our letter differently than we do now. When we first started writing each other, we signed our letters just with our names and later on lylab to me and lylas to her; those meaning “love you like a brother/sister” respectively. Now though I think it’d be safe to say at the very least our friendship has moved into an actual brother sister relationship. As we close most of our letters to each other, whether email or snail mail, we usually tell the other person that we love them, because really it’s true. We do love each other, yet not in the romantic sense of the word at all. The love we share for each other is similar to if not identical to that of a brother to a sister because in essence that is what we are. She’s my adopted sister and I’m her adopted brother. There is no biological relationship between us, but nonetheless there is a bond, which I feel, has been caused by God alone. It was only recently that I found out her real name. Previous to that, I knew her only by her pen name, yet that wasn’t a problem. In as much as we haven’t been able to chat as much as we did almost a year ago, still our friendship has continued to grow which makes me think all the more that God is behind this. I think God not only planned this but also is guiding and blessing it. There are times when I’m doing virtually nothing but when I step back and look, what I am doing is slowly having an effect. The key here though is that it’s not all me. If it was just me, she wouldn’t be getting much, but toss God into the mix and you have a formula for success. I think it’s cool how things have been developing between us. That’s definitely a highlight of the year

   But back to my first year at college, again it’s been overall a great time. There have been a few things that I would have liked to have avoided but well it’s a learning experience. This last semester I took another 16-credit load of classes. My favorite class would probably be philosophy. Of course, part of that is the fact that it’s a Bob class. In case you don’t know what that means, a Bob class is the easiest A you can get. Show up for class, read the book, and take class notes which are fill in the blank and you get an A. the midterm and final is “what are 3 things from the class that have impacted you?” for philosophy though, we have to do a book review on out textbook but hey that wont be a problem at all. I think I’ll rather enjoy doing that. (want to read my review? get it here)

  I’ve loved philosophy. Not so much learning who said what and stuff like that, although Plato and Aristotle’s philosophies were taught, it was more let’s go beyond that to the source of the information or noticia. Bob’s big on the faith model, which helps illustrate where philosophy operates. We have Noticia (information) Asensus (mental agreement) then Fedukia (to warmly embrace) but before noticia, we have Presuppositional authorities, which determine what is true and not. Typically, this is the heart of the philosophical discussion. How do we decide what is right aside from an absolute authority? I don’t see that we can. Aside from the existence of a perfect God, there is no way we can actually know right and wrong. But it seems obvious that something like murder is wrong, but how can we say that unless we have something to compare it to? If we don’t know what is right then how can we say that something is wrong? In my opinion, you can’t, at least not authoritatively. Well enough of the philosophy 101. Needless to say, I enjoyed that class. That class was my Tuesday afternoon class.  

   Tuesday morning I had speech class. I don’t think of myself as a speaker but overall that class went pretty well. I gave 3 speeches; one informative, one persuasive, and one Bible message. Of all of those, my Bible message was the most personal because it had for examples of what I was talking about that special friend who I mentioned a little earlier here. The other ones were about philosophy and Bible interpretation, but back to the Bible message, one of the things I used as part of my message was a card I got from her. I used a few things she said in that to illustrate one of the things that can come from loving one another as Christians are called to do. (read a rough transcript of that speech here)

   Wednesday and Friday, I had New Testament Survey. That was a good class; informative and if nothing else made me interested a little more in theology. Really, the only thing I didn’t like about NT survey was having to get up early. Actually that was one thing I didn’t like anyway so it had more to do with me than the actual class. I had to get up at 6am on class mornings… ugg… not good, at least for me. The funny thing is that when I don’t have classes, I may be up ‘til 3-4am. I’m heavily involved with a message board and it takes me about 4 hours to get through all the posts that I read and I still occasionally have to write an email after I get done with the message boards. (I have a couple of my NT Survey projects posted here)

   Wednesday I had English after an hour break following NT survey. This semester it was based mostly on paragraph writing and stuff like that. I’m not getting as good of grade as I did last semester but I’m close to having the averages be an A. all I have left to take as of writing this is the final. I’m hoping that if I can do great on the final, that’ll be enough to pull my grade back up to an A. cause I’d like to have a GPA close to 4.0 for this semester too. I was 3.925 last semester and I’d like to be close to that again this semester. Last semester English was an easy A; this time though, it’s been a little more work but I haven’t had to put too much effort.

   The final class I’m taking was Christian Life & Ethics. That class was Friday afternoon and basically it was the 101 version of philosophy class. at least when we got started we were going over the same stuff, but as we went further on we started to deviate slightly but the general aim of the class was the same as philosophy. Bob would bring up things that were relevant, like the war in Iraq, Operation Iraqi Freedom, and we’d examine that, and topics like that. We also took a look at the Nuremburg Trials, which if you don’t know, was a movie made about the trials of war criminals in post WWII Germany. We looked at some of the ethical issues that were in that film and for some of them discussed how they could be seen in the modern world. One topic that Bob talked about was dating and mate selection. Basically he was laying out principles for us to use in this area of life, but the thing about those principles is that they can be used elsewhere. This class was also a reunion of sort. We few people from the Mexico trip came to this class and only this one. So it was one of those classes that was cool because of that.

  So, one year of college is almost in the books. GPA wise I think I’m in pretty good shape. That aside though, I’ve had to learn lessons that aren’t academically taught. The only way you learn about these things is experience. I had to learn some rather painful lessons that I guess are just part of growing up. If I say the word “girl,” I’m sure you can figure out the general idea. Pretty much all this semester I’ve been having to learn how to move on in life, it’s hard, at times can seem super hard, but I’m getting there. Basically what happened in a nutshell was I liked a girl but when I finally told her I found out that she had been going out with another guy who was also a friend of mine; almost more of an acquaintance really but working together on a mission trip has a way of making people friends even if they don't know each other very well. So ever since that, I’ve been learning how to move on past that. Obviously that relationship wasn’t the best thing for me so I guess it was just a speed bump in my life as I head toward my goal of flying fighters. When I started coming here to Moody Northwest, I had no intention of that happening whatsoever. I was planning to come here for a year or so, then move on into another university and the Air Force and only after I was all through training even begin to look for anything like that. That was what made this event even more surprising that it happened because I simply wasn’t looking for it and it happened. Oh well… it wasn’t one of those love at first sight things either. I don’t really believe in that. It was more of a the more I get to know you the more I liked you sort of thing. The adventure of life, I think this was one example of that.

    This past school year has been one of learning, both academic and experiential. There have been challenges but by the grace of God, I’ve met them. Were they hard? You bet, they wouldn’t be challenges if they were easy. But I can say, it has been profitable. Experience gained and knowledge increased. Easy? No. But worth it? Definitely…