UT's first snow day

In February of 1899 there was an Arctic surge that brought 6 inches of snow to the south. Students awoke to a snow-covered campus during the days before telephones and email and six days of classes. So like any ordinary saturday morning, classes began at 8 a.m. Students went about their regular business only to be distracted by the snow! They held the president hostage with snowballs and fired a cannon to bring the entire campus to get a holiday for having snow in Texas. So, this is a picture of that fateful day =)

oh the questions we will ask.........

i always have really mixed feelings about filling out questionnaires. they're always tedious and require much strain on the brain. however, i always feel so much more enlightened after filling one out. as a result of questionnaires i'm able to realize more about myself than i had never thought of before.

i always have mixed feelings about those questions that deal with your strenghts and weaknesses and I ususally get stumped by those questions that ask me about the greatest challenges in my life. More recently, I've come across questions dealing with my encounters with cultural diversity. In the past when I thought about that question, my mind would rewind back to mission trips or moving around a lot as a kid. Now when I think of an answer to that question I'm reminded of the orientation program.

The irony of orientation is that I don't feel like I got most of what I went there to get but at the same time I didnt leave the experience empty-handed. It's funny that it's taken me nearly half a year to debrief this experience. After it ended I really wasn't sure what to make of it. Now that it's winter break I finally have sometime to sit down and process everything.

I met many great people and was exposed to multiple schools of thought. I was challenged for my beliefs and respected for them. The experience thought me how to deal with conflict and resolve differences between people. I was forced to take on leadership roles and be a representative of something greater than myself. Constantly, I was put into uncomfortable situations and was expected to make the right choices. All summer the orientation staff joked about filming our lives at orientation like the Real World series....the drama, the conflict, the romance, the action, the cursing, the hot girls, you name it....we had it. Orientation was truly a real world experience. Too bad it's taken me this long to sell this experience to the world...otherwise I could have made better efforts to recruit people to orientation.

It's taken me a while to realize why I was given the opportunity to be a part of orientation. At the fall aacm retreat I constantly heard people sharing about how significant things happened for them at orientation. Interestingly, I felt joy thinking about how I was inadvertantly present during those significant moments. Somehow I think we're always at the right place at the right time, we just don't know it till it's over.

happy new year?

as is with traditions, once the festivities have pasted I make new years resolutions the second day of the year. considering that i only have an hour left of the 2nd, i should make this snappy.

just got back from urbana tired, brain-clogged, enlightened, and congested. i had the worst plane ride experience of my life. after consultation with a few doctors, they came to the conclusion that the knife i felt jabbing down my ears during the plane descent was due to congestion of the ear/mouth/nose areas resulting in my ears' inability to release the pressure that was building up. my eyes watered up and my head felt like it was about to explode. after much prayer and about 45 minutes of suffering we landed. praise God.

so now partially deaf for a few days, i can take the time to process the goings on of urbana. many people that had gone to urbana before always said that urbana would be an experience that would change your life in dramatic ways. while for many the dramatic changes happened instananeously, many others may not see the dramatic change for many years to come. although i dont feel like my life has been dramatically changed, i can see how some of the things that i learned or the ideas that i felt God had bestowed in my mind will one day change my life.

one thing i took away with me from urbana is that the greatest temptation in any kind of relationship is to want to change the person into someone that you want them to be but ultimately God simply calls us to love them. This statement was in regards to the kind of attitude we should have in the area of missions. when we want to change people, that prevents us from valuing the person for who God created them to be. there's a fine line between wanting to change someone's habits and changing their character but at times either one may not be what should be done. i find that the disappointment of missions can sometimes be the expectation that going on a mission trip will change something about the people being served but then nothing appears to happen. i think those expectations can be thwarted when understanding that God calls us on a mission to show love to those who may never have experienced it to the fullest in their lives. afterall God is love, no?

so i guess my resolution this year is to learn how to view missions in the perspective of love. in a tangible way i hope to keep up better with current events so that i can learn to love people outside the little bubble i live in.