It's been a month.

I have not posted since March 6 and a ton has gone on since then.

Most recently I have been really discouraged by signing up for housing this past week. About a month ago the capus was informed that we shoudl begin looking for roommates for next school year so that when sign ups for housing came around everyone woule have their groups together to sign up for housing. On campus we have 6 buildings for housing. North Hall is where I have lived for the last 2 years and it is an all guys dorm. East Hall is identical to North accept all girls. Covnenant Hall and West Hall are girls and guys dorms. East Campus apartments consists of 6 apartment buildings with 8 apartments in each, and Southview is on big apartment building with 28 apartments in it. The way housing goes is that seniority gets priority so Southview and East Campus Apartments usually fill up quick and then on down the food chain until everyone on campus has somewhere to live. So I began looking for roommates about 2 months ago because I wanted to amek sure that I would be living with people I liked next year. But nobody was committing to a room because 3 of the guys I wanted to live with were re-applying to be Registerd Assistants for the dorms. So I then went to 2 other guys and asked about their housing situation and the 3 of us became a group, but we needed 3 more guys to have a full apartment and have the best chance of making it into the apartments. So the results for the RA interviews came out the day before spring break and at that point I was torn between 2 groups basically waiting on one of them to way you are in for sure. Well I was pretty well set with the one group I was in with the other 2 guys and the other group included 4 guys that I had approached earlier about living with them. All this to say that when I came back from spring break I recieved an email from the 2 guys in the group I was currently in, telling me that they were joining the other 4 guys in the othe rgroup completing both of their groups in to on group of 6( which makes a full room) and I was the odd man out. Oh yeah, I got that email 2 days before when we needed to hand in our housing forms for next year.

So as of right now I am signed up with nobody again, just like last year, and the school will pick who my roommate for next year will be, whether a transfer student, and incoming freshmen or if I am lucky they will not house me with anyone and I get the room to myself. At this point I am really disappointed in the people that I though were friends of mine, and after this whole ordeal I really feel betrayed and it seems like nobody cares. I feel like I know a fair amount of people, but very few if any of those people do I trust to talk about something more serious than the typical "How was your day?" kind of small talk.

I would not be surprized if my explaination of the house stuff did not make sense, but basically I was set to live with some guys and at the last minute they dumped me and went and completed another room and I was stuck with nobody to live with for next year.

Among other issues I am dealing with, I have about a month of classes left and then a week of finals and I am already struggling to find the desire to keep working hard in all my classes.

I will post more later about my spring break and such.

-Joel

The Verse

So I just realized that I posted Galatians 1:10 at the top of the last post, but failed to explain or even allude why. This verse has been on my mind for a while now. I see situations and experience situations on a daily basis where the decision of whether to plase men or God is at hand, and people are constantly making split second decsions to either way. It is an interesting paradox because I want to not have to worry about what others think of me or what level of popularity is, and frequently I sarcifice my devotion to God to increase my acceptability to people and to improve my popularity. I am so frustrated by living what is essentially a double life and I am more frusrated by the idea that me living this way is contributing to the problem of hypocrisy in today's churches. That is all the verse was about, but I would really like to open this up for discussion. SO if you have any thoughts on the problem or the solution or just some thoughts or comments on the matter then feel free to post somehting up in the comment section.
Talk to you soon.
-Joel

P.S. - I come home in 66 days.

Galatians 1:10

"Am I now trying to win the approval of men, or of God! Or am I trying to please men? If I were trying to please men, I would not be a servant of Christ."

It is been quite a while since I posted last. Honestly I just didn't know eactly what I wanted to write for while, but now I'm back.
As I am writing this it is 2:47pm on Saturday. I woke up about an hour ago not intending to sleep that late, but let me give you some background. Over the course of this past Thursday and Friday we recieved a dump of about 2ft and some inches of snow in a blizzard. So as of yesterday(Friday) afternoon the weather was clearing up enough that me ans 9 other guys decieded to hollow out this massive pile of snow that the on campus "Snow Crew" plowed up. When I say massive I mean roughly 30 yards across and about 10 feet high at it's highest point. So we proceeded to make this igloo big enough to fit all 10 of us in it laying down and we spent the night in the igloo last night. At least for the majority of the night. Me and another guy left at around 4am cause it was impossible to get to sleep, at least in my experience. Futhermore my nice, comfy and warm bed inside the nice, comfy and warm dorm building was beckoning and was WAY more appealing. So I went to bed and did not set my alarm and I slept until aobut 1:30pm today.

I am not a big fan of sleeping this lat in the day for the simple reason that I feel like I have wasted half my day. I have a list of things to do involving homework among all kinds of other odds and ends, and expectations of people of things to do from both here and home. So I was frustrated with myself when I woke up, not to mention the fact that I was really hungry too. Honestly I have bee trying to keep in touch with friends from home and mostly by facebook or email or myspace, but I have not exactly been keeping up soI have a few people giving me messages that include the, "Dude, where are you? You said you were going to keep in touch." kind of snetence in them. It is not that I don't care about keeping in touch, it's more that my priorities are such that messaging my friends from home is not at the top usually. This is just one example of stuff that is on my mind to do.

On to other things. So now I am continuing the rest of this post today(March 6). So today in my "Theology Enging Culture" class we were discussing the reading we had read for today. The reading was about entertainment and the effect it has on our culture, especially youth. At some point the discussion today turned to ADD and ADHD and how televsion and technology as a whole has given our generation an attitude of passivity. Technology does all the thinking for us, and we just watch. W ehave been so trained to be to be interested in the things that are entertaining instead, and this has been applied to more than just TV and computers or some other form of technology. Now we have students that can read, but rarely do becuase it is not entertaining and forces you to think. We have books on CD and now movies are giving us the images to go along with the book to the point where we are not able to read the book without thinking about the movie images. This is shrinking our imaginations. Then the discussion progressed by applying entertainment to youth ministry, and how our pastors are having to compete by making Sunday mornings entertaining to keep the interest of the students. This class is so interesting to see the kinds of things that we are unmasking in our culture, but then I can't help thinking how can Christianity compete. It should not be a competition in the first place, and if it was the competititon is not playing by the same rules. Now we have to constatnly find new ways to keep students attention because if it is not interesting or entertaining then they begin to sqirm and chatter. It is really discouraging to see what we are up against. All of this is still pretty fresh in my mind so I might write more on it later, but that is all for now.

I miss you all and just this past sunday I was imagining going to Northshore on a sunny morning and seeing everybody again. This will come true sooner than we realize. Talk to you soon.

-Joel