My mind is leaking into the keyboard

It's official.

I accepted the teaching assistantship from U of I at Urbana-Champaign. Last week I was getting tired of waiting to hear from U of M, so I started moving forward with going to UIUC out of spite :D. I emailed the Grad InterVarsity chapter to see if anyone was looking for a roommate for next fall. My biggest priority in my future was finding a good Christian community to join immediately, and I figured having a Christian roommate(s) would be a good start. The next day I heard back from a physics grad student whose roomie is graduating. He's currently a small group coordinator for their chapter (which is what I did here at Platteville for a year, now I'm back to being a sg leader), and has a fairly inexpensive two-bedroom apartment. It's less expensive than other places because his landlord doesn't advertise much, i.e. I wouldn't have found it otherwise :D. He said it's big enough to host a small group Bible study, so I'm pretty sure that I'm going to land in the middle of a good Christian community if it works out. Then there's some other little things, like its unfurnished, but he has enough furniture for the living room, so all I need is a bed, dresser, and desk, which is what I just happen to already have.

Four hours after I heard about that, the university of minnesota finally got back to me and offered me a TA there, but I didn't even think about it seriously. Maybe because I had a cold, maybe because I don't have time to second guess myself, and maybe because the stipend they offered me was $17/month less than what UIUC offered :P. Actually, it's probably because UIUC's EE grad program is considered to be one of the best in the world (comparable to MIT and Stanford) and I just needed a little extra momentum to choose the better of two very good choices.

Other ways that God has been leading me to UIUC is that next weekend there is a Tau Beta Pi conference on that campus (TBP is an engineering honors society). Since I'm a member, I can go for free and get to see the campus, possibly attend Grad IV's large group meeting, and possibly finalize housing.

Final random thought of this post: I'm not actually that gung ho to get a masters degree. While I do enjoy my major, part of me would rather be a pastor than an engineer. I'm doing this because this is where God has sent me. He gifted me in this area and has given me enough patience to get some more schooling and that's all I know. Honestly though, I feel like I'm building a resume similar to the one that Paul lists in Phillipians 3. I'm really just waiting for the day God directs me to give all this engineer stuff up for the sake of his kingdom. Maybe that'll never happen, but I'll be ready for it if it ever does.

What the Future May Hold

Spring break is in about a week and because of one professor in particular and work I'm going to be quite busy until then. Yesterday I had a few hours free and decided to get a jump start on a difficult and potentially time consuming lab project that's due next Wednesday. After only about three hours of work I got part one (of two) working properly and was able to check off with my professor. Let me tell you, I felt pretty good about getting that done, so when I ran into some friends who were going downtown for cheap tacos I went along and did some relaxing, which was amazing. Around this time I started thinking "Man, the only way my day could be better is if I had an email from a grad school or employer waiting for me."

I called UMN and UIUC about a week and a half ago, and they both said I should be notified by the middle of March, so in the last week or so I've been reminded a few times of filling out those cereal box offers when I was little (like <13 years old). I collected all the UPC symbols then laboriously addressed an envelop and sent it off. And began to wait the 8-12 decades it takes for them to process it and send the toy to me. By the time it got within a few weeks of the predicted time period, I'd start wondering every day before the mail came, "Maybe today is the day. It PROBABLY isn't, but wouldn't it be cool if it was?" And I'd get all excited and then disappointed until the day it finally arrived.

Which brings me back to the present. I've been checking my email even more obsessively than usual because every time it crosses my mind I think "Maybe they sent the email today/this morning (/in the last five minutes). Yesterday after thinking that my day could only get better if I got an email, I actually didn't check my email until much later because I didn't want to expect my day to be THAT amazing. When I got home we had a ton of people in the house for the Platteville Safe Spring Break Party Challenge, so it wasn't until 10:30ish that I looked carefully enough at my email to realize that I had an important email.

The electrical engineering department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne accepted me in to their program and offered me a "half-time" teaching assistantship (which means I get free tuition and money to live on in exchange for working as a ta). When I could breath again, my first impulse was to show it to my roommates (weaving around the 4 million people that still populated our house), call my parents and tell them, and show it to a couple other people that were at the party.

When I was thinking about whether or not to blog about it, my first thought was that this is kind of an impersonal way to tell some of my good friends, and I'd rather tell them personally. But then I decided that next to the people immediately around me, my closest friends read my blog, and so I decided to go for it.

I'm still not going to UIUC for certain, or even grad school for certain, but I now have a concrete option for the next couple years of my life. Before now all I had was potential, which doesn't put food on the table :).

Yesterday It Was Spring

And now it's winter again.

Phooey











-the end

Had a Jehovah's Witness stop by

Yesterday morning a Jehovah's witness stopped by and caught me in between classes. He was a bigger guy and looked like he was in his 40's or so. I had a few minutes so I invited him in.

He talked for a few minutes how its hard to "find peace" in this world with everything that's going on. I'd say more about what he said, but he pretty much just repeated and elaborated on that idea. Then he read Isaiah sixty five verses twenty-something. It was a prophecy about a time of peace and prosperity returning. His point in that was that many people don't have that today. He said he was going around encouraging people to look into the Bible to find peace.

I sat quietly and listened, resisting the urge to grab my Bible that was sitting on the table a couple feet away from me and waited for him to finish his thoughts. When I had a moment I said that I don't even look for peace in this world because it can't be found. I have peace through my relationship with Jesus Christ, by living for him. With that he basically said "good for you, its too bad lots of people aren't like that" and left.

What struck me as odd was that I didn't even know whether he was a Jehovah's Witness or Mormon. I figured it out because the literature that he offered me was watchtower, which google told me is Jehovah's Witness. My thought afterwords was "Wow, even these guys have gotten pansy in the way they share what they believe." I mean the guy no disrespect. He clearly meant well, but his approach was really weak sauce.

Not much activity here

Most of my blogging energy has been directed towards our Zambia team blog so check in there if you miss me :D.

Weapons of Mass Destruction

For those of us who are still willing to consider the possibility that President Bush was not out to invade Iraq from the beginning and didn't spread a net of lies to convince everyone to agree with him. Here is an article by CNN that says Saddam Hussein admitted to pretending that he had WMD's in order to intimidate Iran.

Nice to know that the "independent" report that chronicled over 900 false statements by the Bush administration between 2001 and 2003 is still hardly proof that Bush is a liar, besides the fact that the "independent" report was funded by a liberal group that has been funded by someone who publicly compares America today to Nazi Germany.

In Case You're Interested after all my talk about Kenya

Here's a really good article about the current conflict in Kenya and how the church there is responding.

http://www.urbana.org/_articles.cfm?RecordId=1160

American Media: The Image or the Mirror?

I was reading news this morning and noticed a headline about the ongoing tribal violence in Kenya. After I read the article, which was located on the BBC's website, I started wondering if any American news services were covering the same story. Being the inquisitive person that I am, rather than simply wondering, I investigated.

First on the list: CNN. I navigated from the US section to the main page to the "WORLD" section. On all three the headline was about the Democratic Primary race in South Carolina. Since when is that world news?!?! A 30 second search of this page and I couldn't find any reference to the conflict in Kenya (I figure that's more than the average American would spend, and the average one wouldn't be looking for that specific article.)

Next for the chopping block was Fox News: They actually had "world" events on their world page. Fox also had an article about the Kenyan conflict too. However, it was buried in a list of about 30 minor articles at the bottom, I'm still not impressed.

Last of all was Reuters (which I didn't check until later, I started this blog post about 9:15 am). Unfortunately for the sake of this post, Reuters had a fairly large feature about the Kenyan situation. At this, I returned to FoxNews and CNN, which even more unfortunately for this post, now have featured articles on the world section of their websites.

But, for the sake of the first half of this blog, lets say that's not true. I was going to go on a bit of a rant on how either the American media or Americans in general have little interest in what's going outside of their own little world. The title raising the question of whether its the media that doesn't care and the general public follows, or if the media is simply catering to what Americans are interested in. But in any case, I have some news articles to read about what's going on in Kenya :D.

Culture

A couple days ago I came across a new band... well, a band that's new to me. Within Temptation is a goth-rock group with a female lead vocalist, very comparable to Evanescence. The main difference that I noticed is that they use an orchestra to powerful effect in several of their tracks. Within Temptation would be accused of being a copy cat band, except that WT has actually been around longer than Evanescence. They started in Norway in the late 90's, and were well received in their home country. It took about a decade for their popularity to spread to Holland and the rest of Europe and then finally to the states. They released a new cd in 2007 on a deal with an American record label.

What I find interesting is that it seems that the pinnacle of musical success is to sign a deal with an American record company and record in the US. In many things it seems that reaching fame in America is the "top." The only exception I can think of is soccer. The best MLS (Major League Soccer, also known as MajorLy Sucks) players migrate to European Leagues. I'm reminded of an article I read about understanding other cultures. It said that everyone knows American culture because it spreads everywhere. But most Americans know little about other cultures, when traveling they take at least a little bit of their own culture with them. Even on missions trips Americans tend to stay in nice clean American hotels and eat nice American food. In France I've heard that there's a law that requires radio stations to play at least as many songs by French artists as by American artists. Our culture is pretty invasive, so it takes more effort for us to get to know other cultures than it does for others to get to know ours.

Something I heard today (well, I started this blog two weeks ago)

I was listening to Christian radio this morning and the DJ read the days "Word on the Way," the Bible verse of the day. He talked about it for just a minute, and I don't remember the verse, but his application for it is that it is wrong to think that what your denomination believes is right and other denominations that disagree with you are wrong. He said if you think that, stop, because that's what divides Christians.

That kinda bugged me, because if I don't think that what I believe is right, what's the point in believing anything? I understand the importance of accepting the possibility that I am in error and respecting the beliefs of those who disagree with me. It is really important for Christians to avoid over-emphasizing minor theology, especially when it comes to unity in the universal church, but I believe what I believe because I think it's true. By definition, it follows that I believe that those who disagree with me are wrong. Could I be wrong? Absolutely. But that doesn't mean that have to agree that someone else is just as right as I am when one of us is clearly in error.

What divides Christians is not individuals standing for what they believe. Divisions are caused by Christians who are unwilling to agree to disagree.