Aside from the crazy issues we had with getting registered before the sem started, them not having me registered for all my classes when I had that sort of thing, things went pretty smoothly. I still have yet to get my grades back from the sem but I would think it would be safe to assume that I at the very least didn’t hurt the 3.91 gpa I had going into this sem. Hermeneutics came first in the week. I’m pretty sure I got an A out of that one. Unless something unexpected happened which I don’t know about that’s what I should have gotten. There were definitely some good things done in there. One of the projects we did was a survey of a book of the Bible. More specifically the book of Philippians. Of the 2 study methods that we went into that was I think the one I liked the best. The other method, the biographical method is ok and will probably be a nice tool to know but I didn’t like it as well as I liked the survey method. Could be that’s because of the type of person that I am. I enjoyed kinda piecing things together and going from there. One of the steps was to assign titles to every paragraph in the book. Seems like a daunting task but really it wasn’t that big. I had to come up with maybe 15-20 titles I think. 4 chapters of maybe 4-5 each so yea that was definitely doable. The nice thing about doing that is it gives you a more systematic way of remembering exactly what’s in a book and a rough idea of where it is. I do need to go back and review that though; I can’t remember it right now. I was surprised though just how often after I had completed that project that in listening to other things that a part of that outline kept coming to mind. I’d be listening to a sermon or something like that and remember a part of that outline. And then I could think though the chapter titles and then paragraph titles and figure out roughly where something was within maybe a verse or 2. And that’s for the whole book too. Those projects will be put up here it’s just a matter of will I do more. It’s in outline format right now, which I can follow but I’m not sure if it would be too distinguishable to another person unless they knew what to look for. Hmm… that’s something to look into. If not this update then maybe a later one… anyhow that was the best one. The biographical method looked at a person’s life and what lessons can be learned from it. I did mine on Gideon. There’s just something about him that I find so real. His questioning things, his timidness; I find that so real. There’s something about a guy who sees so much but still cant quite put it all together and just go on it. There’s something I can identify with in that which is part of the point but sometimes it’s easy to look at Bible characters as people who lived eons ago who didn’t face the things we do today and so their lives were so much easier than ours; and of course they trusted God completely; but it’s different now… it’s so easy to slip into thinking that, but they were real people too, granted different times and place but people nonetheless. The common theme I ran into always had to do with what happened with Katie. The fact that we’re now apart for possibly indefinitely makes it really hard to press on and trust that God’s got the best plan in motion. Those were the lessons that came out of those studies. That was also the only class I had with Heather. Towards the end of the sem I had some thoughts floating around in my mind that I couldn’t quite make sense of. Now that the sem is over they’re not really there so I guess there was nothing to them but yea, we were talking possibly romantic interest if you hadn’t picked up on that by now. Anyhow, the sem is over and nothing happened there so guess the timing wasn’t right. It’s somewhat funny, our pastor’s son and his wife met in that class in one of the small group projects that we did quite often as a class. One day towards the end of the sem the prof said this was going to be the last small group session so it would be the last time for us to get hooked up. In my group, I was the only one who wasn’t in some sort of a relationship like that. I wonder though how many were in that boat with me. I would guess I was close to if not alone in the “never dated” category; that’s just rare in today's world, but nonetheless that's me. That was something that happened too but not exactly what I’m talking about right now. So back to the classes. That took up Tuesday morning and as fate would have it I had all morning classes. Typically, I’d hang around for an hour or two to wait for the traffic to lighten up some before heading home. Towards the end of the sem though I started going home earlier and earlier after class got out because there was no one there really. Most of the people there took off right after class. Heather was definitely that way. You could count on her being out the door within a few minutes of class getting out. So that was Tuesday, and hermeneutics.

   Wednesday and Friday were consumed by theology II. It was one of those classes that like last sem I wasn’t looking forward to but it was required so I took it anyway. One of the main things that I didn’t like was the fact that we had 2 research papers to do this time. It ended up being better than I thought it was going to be but going into it I still really didn’t care for theology. The fact that we had a prof who was more focused on the practical aspects of theology was definitely a big help in keeping my interest even somewhat up. It was kinda one of those classes that was there but nothing really sticks out at me about it. I did 2 papers as was required; the first one I did on the presence and extent of spiritual gifts and the 2^nd was the extent of the atonement both of which will be posted when this is. That took up a couple more mornings of the week. 2 more days of dragging myself out of bed at 6am which is too early for anyone to be up, but that’s just my view. Typically, after that one got out for the day I’d hang around for an extra hour or two. Usually Ryan Downie and I would have some good games of ping-pong going back and forth for that hour or even more sometimes. Something interesting that we did was a group final. Going into it I wasn’t so sure that I was going to like it but we ended up getting 100% so cant complain too much. It was an interesting concept that I guess had been done before with that theo prof. The way it worked was we went through the final question by question with each person answering 1. After everyone had answered 1 then everyone was in again as once you had answered 1 you couldn’t answer ‘til everyone had answered 1. then you could answer another one. I went last in 2 of the 3 rounds that it took to get through the questions. It was an interesting concept to say the least. After it I have to say I cant argue with 100% on the final, that’s for sure.

   Thursdays class was really the only class that I’m not sure how much it’s going to be useful. Educational foundations was really a intro to teaching class. Teaching is far form where I want to head but it was the only class that I could get that would fulfill the either or class requirement. In some ways some of the principles may be useful in other things but in all reality the majority of that class will be filed under the “nice to know” category of things in my mind. Teaching is something that is far from my mind when it comes to what I want to do, at least as far as the classroom experience is concerned. The more informal teach by example I’m cool with but I don’t really want to be a classroom type teacher. I don’t feel like I’m teacher material, but I took a class on teaching. One of the things we did was watch a video series on teaching. 7 laws of the learner series. I had to do some thinking in a theoretical teaching setting how I would use the laws… I would imagine I got an A in that class. We’ll have to wait and see but that was a class that was kinda there. I took it because it was a requirement only. Early on I’d treat Thursday like a Tuesday. I’d be around for a while then head home. Towards the end of the sem though I had to change my plans around. I had added a night class to my roster of things to do so I hung out there all day. I would get there around 7:20am and leave usually around 9:15pm.

   The night class I took was one that I wish I could have had during the daytime. It was so compresses because it was a sem worth of material in a couple months or 8 weeks max, but it was a good class. Intro to counseling was a class that I wanted to take after Katie suggested I look into that. Looking back that was hard in some aspects as it brought to the surface some of the things that still really hurt from what happened at the end of last sem in losing Katie. The class was an intro to counseling. And what made it somewhat hard was the fact that the class looked at some of the results of betrayal; something that I felt like I had done to Katie. Things like that made that class more difficult but at the same time it wasn’t one that I could approach from a purely academic standpoint. It just wouldn’t be possible. There were too many things that crossed paths with what had happened with Katie and what had been happening since then. Thankfully though the class would get out at 9 each class night instead of 9:30. Granted it was only a half hr difference but it was nice not having to be on the road much after 10 at night. I’ve done that before and while it’s doable, I’d prefer to be home by that time. The most stressful part of that class though was the final. I had no clue what the final was going to look like. Even when I got the handout that the final was going to come from it took me a long time to find the answers to the questions. It was challenging, even going into the final I wasn’t sure I knew how I wanted to answer every single question on there. It was a list of 10 with the final being 5 of them. The ones that were on the final were ones that I was marginally sure I knew how to answer. I wasn’t sure about one of them but the problem each question was worth 20 pts… ouch… so we’ll see what I got. I think I did ok but thinking and reality are oftentimes 2 different things.

   That’s a little bit of what went on from the academic standpoint of the past sem. Because it was only 4 classes the load was light from that academic standpoint. In that sense it made it a much more relaxing sem which in one way is great because of the heavy emotional stress load that came on me and really never left and to some degree remains to this day.

   It was hard enough trying to balance what work I had to do, but throw on all the hurt from the deepest wound I’ve ever had made it a lot harder as the sem stretched on. Going into this sem the hurt was still really fresh on my mind. it had only been a couple months since Katie and I had last been in touch. It was a couple months before the sem started that I sent Katie my last email for who knows how long. And that really hung over me as things begun. It was a dark cloud that wasn’t going to go away any time soon. It hung and hung, even now it’s not completely gone and I don’t know that it’s going to completely ever. Academically things were fine and as long as I had my mind in that mode everything was cool. The problem lay in the evenings when I would start to relax and reflect back on the events of the day, doing what I usual do. post on cgr. Even that though I felt had been starting to slip away form me. as time went by I began to feel like an outsider there. I had put in so much time and effort into that place and it had begun to feel like I was a nobody. The people I invested my time with were the people who were new or somewhat unknown. Because of that the click of “popular” people ran in different circles than I did. They were constantly giving reputation points to each other for no reason other than it was something to do, and things like that. Then here I was, doing things more under the radar so I got none of all that stuff. Slowly people started showing less and less interest in what I posted which didn’t help much. It was a time when I was hurting from what I had to do in Katie’s situation. So I eventually left, I figured if people weren’t going to show interest I wasn’t going to offer anything.

   Honestly this past sem has been my closest encounter with anything that even remotely resembled depression. It seemed like everything was somehow not going like I planned. It was rough. On top of this too there was the whole issue of Ron coming down with cancer and continuing to fight that. I didn't realize when I went to graduate that had it not been for the cancer returning he would have been there too. I couldn’t have known but even so it was something of a shock to hear. Ron would have been part of the 8 of us who were graduating. Yea only a couple had a full 4 year degree but hey even a 2 year degree is a step in the right direction as far as I’m concerned. I remember back in February I think it was, there was a couple days of conference sessions I guess and it seemed like so many things were pointing to what had been going on with me. the emotional ups and downs that I’d been running into, I don’t know I guess that’s just how things are sometimes. One of the few people who I ever let in on what is really going in was John. He was one of those people who made it impossible to really start thinking that no one cared what was going on. As you could imagine there were some days that were harder than others. Really though with the exception of valentines day a day wasn’t really the problem. What became difficult was at night. Night time is when my mind slows down some and it’s also when things become most difficult. Memories start floating back and especially when it’s just me alone online at night it becomes harder than during the day. When I’m doing things during the day my mind is busy enough that I don’t have time ot think about any of this. but at night, I have plenty of time to think about it. some of the time it comes at the expense of sleep. On a few occasions that was on purpose but for the most part sleep was just hard to come by. Towards the tail end of the sem there was a period of about a week where I averaged maybe 3 hrs a night over a period of about 4 days. Considering I would normally be getting only about 5 anyway that wasn’t a big loss but it was a loss and made things more difficult as I began to wind down the sem. One thing that did help though was figuring out that if I cooled my room off that would help. so I started having my window open for a while at night and that did help.

  As I look back on this sem gone by, there’s no doubt that it’s been a difficult one. not academically speaking but the fact is, when I don’t know what’s going on, why, or what’s going to happen next that can take its’ toll very quickly; and it did. It was difficult, and I’m glad its done, and that doesn’t even begin to explore the confusion I had floating around in my mind over heather which only added to the mix. So many things have been in flux and changing lately that I guess I’m in adjust mode. Whatever comes I have to just adjust to what it’s going to be.