Thursday excitement

Lots of stuff going on today. It's turned out to be a pretty good Thursday.

• I've been working with a professor to get a Women in Computing group started on campus, and today a big step was made. I had lunch with the professor, 2 other female students, and 5 female staff people involved in computers in some fashion. Everyone had good ideas and stories of how they ended up where they are today. We hope to have another brainstorming meeting in a couple weeks, involving more women computer students, and perhaps a study break before the end of the semester. Hooray.


• I've got 2 tests tomorrow, in Human-Computer Interaction and Contemporary Christian Belief. Yay for studying...


• I've got 3 hours of work to put into my software engineering project, which will be good now that I'm very motivated on this project and it's starting to pick up momentum.


• Donald Miller, the author of one of my favorite books, Blue Like Jazz, is going to have a question-and-answer session tonight at a coffeeshop in Marion. I REALLY want to go, but the above couple points, unfortunately, take precedence. We'll see how the day goes.


• Tomorrow begins a fun weekend, with a three-year-old's birthday party on Saturday and our last pre-marriage class.

And I leave you with excerpts from Blue Like Jazz:

The magical proposition of the gospel, once free from the clasps of fairy tale, was very adult to me, very gritty like something from Hemingway or Steinbeck, like something with copious amounts of sex and blood. Christian spirituality was not a children’s story. It wasn’t cute or neat. It was mystical and odd and clean, and it was reaching into dirty. There was wonder in it and enchantment.

The greatest trick of the devil...is not to get us into some sort of evil but rather have us wasting time. This is why the devil tries so hard to get Christians to be religious. If he can sink a man’s mind into habit, he will prevent his heart from engaging God.”


I felt so far from my upbringing, from my narrow former self, the me who was taught the Republicans give a crap about the cause of Christ. I felt a long way from the pre-me, the pawn-Christian who was a Republican because my family was Republican, not because I had prayed and asked God to enlighten me about issues concerning the entire world, not just America.... I didn’t think that Jesus agreed with a lot of the policies of the Republican Party, or for that matter, the Democratic party. Jesus was a religious figure, not a political figure.

Everybody wants to be fancy and new. Nobody wants to be themselves. I mean, maybe people want to be themselves, but they want to be different, with different clothes or shorter hair or less fat. If there was a guy who just liked being himself and didn’t want to be anybody else, that guy would be the most different guy in the world and everybody would want to be him.”