Loooooong week

Want to know why I've been saying nothing here for a while? Well, Jay over at Adventures of a Christian Collegian put it excellently in his list of things he has learned at college.

Professors are knowingly and incontrovertibly in an evil alliance to assign all quizzes, tests, and major papers during the same exact week. This cannot be avoided no matter what professors you pick. Even the ones you thought were cool (because they were younger and perhaps only went by their first name, which was something usually along the lines of "Mark" or "Jenny") are in on this conspiracy.

I had three tests this week, a quiz, and two major assignments. Throw into that my job working at the commons, helping to plan a pro-life rally in the spring, staying up late trying to keep my potentially concussed roommate awake, and fitting a religious retreat into my schedule, it's been a hectic week. I've had about four nights out of the past seven that have only had about four to five hours of sleep.

In the past 24 hours, I got 15 hours of sleep. I went on a run with one of my friends too, and I feel awesome, even though I'm helping to run a table to promote a pro-life speaker tomorrow, and I'm not entirely sure what's all going on with that. But that's not all of why I feel awesome.

Friday night at the retreat, we had faith sharing. Now, this scares the ever-loving hell out of me (I like using "ever-loving" as a swear modifier, but it doesn't really make as much sense here). I love faith sharing though. It feels so good to be able to talk to people and feel like they understand you, and maybe to get some things off of your chest. My usual policy with faith sharing is that once I think of something I want to talk about, I always wait fifteen seconds after the last speaker, to give someone who maybe urgently wants to talk the chance to get up there and speak. Plus, it kind of makes it easier to avoid going up front too if I give myself that time period.

God however, had different plans than for me to sit quiet that night though. After a couple of people went up (including one of my close friends, that had a problem he hadn't told me about, but I'm glad he let it out), I was doing my counting thing, and I got up past twenty. Nobody was making any moves, and finally I just said "screw it" to my insecurities and I stood up. Once you stand up, you can't really sit back down without people noticing, so I was locked in.

A lot of people had been talking about prayer and what it's done for them, so I started there. I said how what prayer does is awesome, but what prayer is is even better. I talked about how great it is to be able to talk to God whenever you wanted to, and my favorite ways to pray. And then I said how there was one prayer I wasn't sure about. Whenever I say it, I wonder if I'm saying or using it right or whatever.

That prayer is the Our Father. There's a line in it that says "forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." But as I told them, I have a huge grudge. There is someone that I haven't forgiven, and I don't know how to forgive him. I don't know where he is or what he's doing or whether he's even sorry or not, and I don't know how to get closure and let go of this whole situation. If I'm doing well, I don't usually think about it, but when I start getting tired or stressed out, if I have nothing else to distract me, it will be the only thing I think about. Just on and on through my mind, as many bad thoughts about all of this as I can think of. I told them how sometimes I just can't function right because of it. And I apologized to my friend Dan, because the "problem" I talked about in this post had to do with how I can't forgive this person. I've been praying about this, but I still haven't found a solution.

Afterwards, people were hugging me, and I kept bursting out into tears. My friends told me to just keep praying, and that God never gives us more than we can handle. One of my friends told me I was beautiful, because that was the first thing that popped into her head. I definitely felt a lot more beautiful than I had in a while.

For the first time in almost three years since this grudge started, I actually talked to someone about it. Sure, I didn't go deep into it, and when Dan wanted to ask me more about it, I had to tell him that I'm sworn to secrecy about the specifics (which is the truth, until I ask for that promise to be given back to me). But I did bring it up. I finally told people about it. In my daily journal that night, I think I wrote "I did it!" close to eighteen times in a row, I was just that happy.

It may not be much, but it's a start, and that's how healing works, a little bit at a time.

I knew this would happen

YES! College is getting into full-swing, and I am tired and swamped. My computer science homework had me up until 6 in the morning last night, and it was really just to solve unsolvable (at least with our current knowledge) things that the teacher never told us we'd come up against. Fun stuff.

Also, I cut my thumb on a shard of glass that was embedded in the sole of my shoe. I just thought it was a pebble, go sue me. I have to slow down on the guitar practicing until at least tomorrow night, I think.

My friend is doing good, he came back after the weekend, and I had supper with him and some other people. He didn't come to the Catholic meeting after supper, but I'm glad he's at least well enough to hang out with people on some degree.

I am seriously behind on my responsibilities as a webmaster for the pro-life club on campus, Students For Life. I'm starting to feel really guilty. I definitely need to change some things, like, everything on the resource page and most of "What we've done" and the board page. That, and I just need to create a new layout in general. The website makes me feel like I'm browsing the internet in a cave. It needs to be cheerier. The rest of the club is doing admirably, and we're hoping to get Jason Evert and/or Christopher West to give a speech on campus, with help in part due to Generation Life. We've got a life rally being planned for the spring as well, with Peter Kreeft showing up on the final day of it.

I've also been having guilty dreams about not exercising enough. In the past three days, I've had two dreams about old coaches of mine berating me for not being in shape as well as I was, or telling me about various opportunities I have on campus to exercise. So, I'm going for a run. Right now. Bye.

Why no post?

This is probably one of the longer gaps I've gone without posting anything. I'm sure all four of you (and I can't even count something cheesy like my mom, because she doesn't even know about this) were extremely worried.

Well, I'll explain in probably one of the best lines from Scripture: "Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends."

I'd like to slightly amend that for the purpose of explaining things. "There is no(t many) greater fatigues than to fear for the life of a friend."

One of my friends, who will remain unnamed, came to me late Wednesday night, and wanted to talk to me in person. Then when we met up, he wanted to talk to me somewhere more private.

Apparently his sister had gone through a complete psychological breakdown about a week ago, and his parents had never told him. He was really worried about his sister, and he was worried about how his parents would react (his parents don't exactly rate high in parenting). He has problems of his own too, so he was worrying that he was going to have a breakdown too, that he would just wake up the next morning and not care about anything.

So, I hung out with him that night. We went exploring the basement of one of the commons, got some cheeseburgers at McDonald's (protein is always good for depression, although that was unintended), and then we made a mash-up of two posters we found in the commons, a blood donation poster, and an ad for a big dinner being held by a frat. Imagine a poster where they try to get you to donate blood by showing a huge black guy with a football helmet on trying to eat the biggest damn hamburger you may have ever seen. And we hung it up. And at least one of them is still hanging up in my commons, because I guess no one has realized yet that it's a spoof.

Like this, only with a helmet on too.

Staying up late killed me though, because once I was done hanging out with him at around 2:30, I had to study for a French test, which I did pretty well on, despite being sleep deprived and stressed out. Later that night, my friend called me again, said he had talked to a psychologist today, but he was worried that his parents had gotten a 302 (involuntary commitment) for his sister, and that they would do the same. In the course of the conversation, he also told me that his psychologist said he was going through "suicidal ideation," which means he's been thinking about committing suicide, without any actual plans or intent to commit suicide.

Luckily, he decided to go home for the weekend, and he's getting help there, but I'm still worried about him. After hanging out with my friends who came up for the football game last night, I slept for ten hours straight, and I still feel kind of tired. So, if you could, please pray for my friend.

Funny and Serious

My blog is rated PG-13! I'm glad, because I was rather worried I might cross over into an R rating. PG-13 is not bad though, I can live with that comfortably. Although it did flag me for using the word "hurt" 5 times. Oops, now six.

As for less comfortable things, since my friend Randi is resigning from the role of president, and I just found out that James, or vice president, is also heavily burdened with schoolwork and will be resigning either at the end of the semester or in a month, people will soon need to be stepping up to take leadership positions. The question I've been asking myself is whether or not I could manage to do that, and also more importantly, whether or not I should. It would be a big commitment, but it's also an important job, especially on our campus. I just hope my prayers will be answered and I'll have some idea about what to do.

Just FYI

I am a one-armed god of programming (metaphorically speaking, of course). Technically, it was more like one-handed with a thumb, but still. Last night my hands got scratched up, and I bandaged them, but it became that everything but my thumb on my left hand is stuck in a clenched position so as not to crack open my wounds (which is not good), and the ring finger on my right hand as well.

This morning, I had my first computer science test of the semester. I was really worried about it. There was a written part, then a programming part. I got around 18/20 on the written part, I'd guess, and I was one of the first people to hand that section in.

When I got to the programming section, I was pretty nervous, but it seemed like I finished the entire program with half an hour to spare. I was confused. Only one other person had finished, and he had only given back his sheet a few seconds before I finished writing my code. I took an extra five minutes just to make sure I had everything that was asked of me. Amazingly enough, I did. So I handed in my paper, and was the second person finished. I beat like, 95% of my class to finishing, and I only had about four fingers to type with (I don't really use my pinkies).

Maybe I might have a future in computer science after all. Thank you God for gifting me and helping me out. I definitely had some help, because there was a word bank that I was not expecting and that totally saved me in the writing section.

How Am I Not Myself? #2

I totally realized yesterday that I had been forgetting about these. I really liked the idea, and I feel kind of bad that I let such a nifty idea slip out of my mind. Anyways, on to the real entry.

I have a friend who went through some very traumatic situations a few years back. I helped this friend through a lot of these problems. I feel very strongly about these sort of things that my friend was thrown into.

Very rarely do I go a week, or most of the time even a day, without part of what I learned from my friend cropping up somehow in my life. It makes it hard to forget my friend. It makes it hard to forget what my friend went through.

However, sometimes I do forget. I forget in a bad way. Worse, sometimes I just choose to ignore the pain my friend experienced. What I sometimes let myself do is just a big "screw you" to my friend.

Very rarely do I ever hate myself, but the times that I feel that way, it's usually when I've chosen to forget about my friend.

How am I not myself?

I am not myself when I forget the pain of my friends.

Help a Brother (or Sister) out!

Over at Andy's blog, I first saw an entry about questioning what you're going through because of all of the difficulties in your life. Check it out. It links to another blog post on one of his friend's blogs, and you can either follow the link train, or just check it out here. I guess this blog post is kind of part three in this series.

We all know that sometimes life is hell. Andy saw that, and it's true, but you still keep making your way through all of it. Will, Andy's friend, has been working hard at trying to make the church he is in better, and that's very hard too.

I guess what I really want to say here is to help out. Help out groups you're in, help out your church, your sports team, your business group, anything. Help out the people in charge, because while they may seem like they're totally in control and invincible, secretly, like Andy and Will, they're really having a difficult time.

I'm the webmaster of a pro-life club here on campus, and because of that, I go to the board meetings we have to plan stuff. My friend Randi, she is the president of the club, and this is pretty much the first big leadership position she's had. I knew she was nervous and scared, but she's been doing a really good job with everything in the club, especially considering that she and the rest of the board are practically rebuilding the club from scratch.

We had a board meeting on Wednesday, and Randi said she wanted to see all of the board members after the meeting (some people from the Catholic club on campus were there as well). I figured she just wanted to talk to us alone to discuss the influence the Catholic club was having on us (it's a secular pro-life club, so we can't really be overtly supporting one religion). She had a much more pressing issue to discuss.

My friend Randi had gone through two panic attacks over the past few days over everything she had been worrying about for being president, not to mention all the pressures of just being a college student. She really just wanted to know that if she decided to resign, that someone else would step up and take her place. We all pretty much told her that the club would definitely be in good hands if she decided to resign, and that if she felt like she had too much work, she should have told us. We would have helped more if she needed it. Heck, as the webmaster, I do almost nothing. I easily could help a lot more, and I told her that.

Leaders aren't invulnerable. They need help too, but more importantly, they need to know that there are people available to help, people they can call on. So even if you just tell someone that you'd be willing to help with events in the future, that'd be quite a burden off of their backs.