Thoughts of a Pseudo-Adult with an Eighth of a College Degree

It's winter break.  One eighth of my undergraduate career is finished.  It went by extremely fast.  During my first semester, I surpassed my GPA goal(which was a 3.5).  I signed a lease for an apartment for next year.  I swam 2 miles in 1 hour.  I failed a few quizzes (Don't worry too much, I got a "B" in the class).  I had pizza delivered for the first time.  I got to know some pretty cool professors.  I put off washing my laundry for longer-than-normally-accepted times.  I was annoyed with my nocturnal roommate.  I watched as some people struggled with college-level coursework while others easily comprehended and understood it.  I spent way too much time watching videos on youtube.com.  I helped give pancakes to people at 2am.  I put a carved pumpkin on my high school guidance counselor's house.  I experienced a cadaver lab.

Obviously my first semester has been full of new experiences here are a few things that I learned:

1.)  Meeting your GPA goal feels absolutely amazing when you find out on Christmas eve.
2.)  Showing up to work on time and doing your job makes your boss like you.
                    I always thought this was logic, but apparently not everyone does this.
3.)  Talking to your professors helps a lot.
                   Large schools frequently get a bad rap about letting students getting lost in the system,                but I learned that the professors generally want to talk to the students, they just have to be                    sought out.
4.)  Signing a lease for an apartment makes you feel more like an adult.
                   Yes, I signed a lease for an apartment which made me feel like an adult for about 10                    minutes and then I was right back to my pseudo-adulthood life. :P  I'll always be a kid. :)
5.)  Exercise.
                    I feel better and sleep better when I exercise.  This should be motivation to exercise for              me, but I'm still fairly bad at doing this on a regular basis.
6.)  When your roommate becomes nocturnal, just roll with it.
7.)  When your roommate smells funny and makes your room smell funny, just pray for a stuffy nose or buy an air freshner.
                    Asking another pseudo-adult to shower was a conversation I didn't want to have.
8.)  Help others when you see them struggle with coursework if they will accept your help.
                   It helps you understand it better and they might even appreciate it.
9.)  Be selective with what you'll spend your time on.  Youtube is great.  Life experience is better.
10.)  It's okay to wait one more day to do laundry.  Really.  Just leave it.  (that is until it starts to smell                   like your roommate)
11.)  Doing something that gets your feet wet in what you have to look forward to gives you more motivation.
                      For me, this was the cadaver lab. It gave me a damp toes and a little more motivation to              work hard to get to medical school.  For other people that may be job shadowing or finding                  an internship.  If you can't get excited about your future, you may want to reevaluate your                    goals.
12.)  Talk to people....some of them are cool and talking to them makes it worth talking to the ones that aren't quite as awesome. :)

Delicious Muffins and other Thoughts about Delightful Nourishment

On my way to math class I had the realization that it was Monday.  Upon realizing this I also remembered that I needed to post a blog.  And so upon arriving to math class an hour early I sat down in the hallway AND.........no ideas came.  Then someone started messaging me and I asked them for an adjective and a noun with the decision that I would blog about whatever he messaged me.  He graciously gave me a noun and an adjective that went together, "Delicious Muffin."

I eat a muffin almost everyday for breakfast.  Sometimes it's a blueberry muffin and other days it's a chocolate-chocolate chip muffin.  Both kinds of muffins are delicious.  However, after nearly a semester of eating nothing but muffins for breakfast, they've become routine.  I easily and unappreciatedly eat my muffin without realizing it's full yummifulness.  I can also become like that in my daily devotionals.  It's very easy to just read a chapter in my devotional book and Bible before I go to bed and not stop to think about it.

But that isn't what God wants me to do.  He wants me to sit down and think about what I'm doing.  He wants me to talk to Him throughout the day.  He asks that I not just read the Bible, but study the Bible as well.  He wants me sit down and think about what I'm reading and why I'm reading it.  It's easy to just read my Bible just like it's easy to eat a muffin, but that muffin has to be digested, and so does the Bible if I actually want to be spiritually nourished.

You see, although digestion isn't a conscious effort, it's still a relatively complicated process that happens in your body.  After you chew(when your teeth crush and break the food to increase surface area to allow your saliva to begin breaking down starch into sugar) you swallow.  Swallowing involves peristalsis, which is a muscular movement allowing you to swallow water while standing on your head (Try it if you want!  I did when I first learned about this....albeit, the librarian thought I was a bit crazy afterwards...).  So in your saliva there are enzymes to break down starch to sugar which is then swallowed with peristalsis and the bolus (the ball of food) is then passed to the stomach!  Then in the stomach the food is broken down farther with gastric acid (composed mostly of Hydrochloric acid).  That sounds simple, right??  But wait!!   When your bolus hits your stomach, there isn't a ton of gastric acid already there.  Why? Because if your body constantly produced Gastric acid you would have the insanely annoying stomach ulcers.  Basically, when your stomach registers that there is food in it, the stomach sends a signal to your body to release the hormone "gastrin" which then tells your body that it's time to produce Gastric acid!  Whew!!  This is complicated and we haven't even absorbed any nutrients yet!

Okay, for the sake of keeping this blog a decent length, I'm going to stop where I am, because I think you get the point.  Digestion can be complicated.  That being said, it happens naturally.  Processing what you're doing when your do a daily Bible reading doesn't come nearly as naturally(at least not for me).  I really have to focus to think about what I'm reading.  Because, afterall, if I am not thinking about, learning about, and letting God convict me through what I'm reading, why am I reading it at all?  From here, I will make it a goal to "digest" my Bible reading.

Living in Reckless Abandonment for Jesucristo,

Jo

P.S. If a blog doesn't happen next week, it's because it's finals week for me.  Enjoy your week!
P.P.S.  Also, if you want more about the digestive system, I recommend a quick google search...I had to in order to remember some of this! :P

What It's all About

I love listening to Pentatonix.  They are a pretty great group to listen to with a semi-unique sound.  With that said, when I listened to this song it really bothered me.  I don't know how much they changed the lyrics compared to other versions of the song because I don't normally listen to a whole lot of Christmas music.  I really hate to pick media apart and this song isn't going to stop me from listening to Pentatonix because I still love their music.  However, while listening to this song I noticed that a huge piece of Christmas  was left out.  Even in their video when they talked individually about what Christmas means, they only mentioned it once.

What was it?

Christmas is someone's birthday.  Christmas is Jesus' birthday.  His birthday is significant for a wide range of reasons.  One of these would be the fulfilling of prophecy.  He was born of a virgin which was prophesied in Isaiah 7:14.  He was born in Bethlehem, which was foretold in Micah 5:2.  Clearly, Jesus, who came with humble beginnings, was the prophesied messiah.  THAT is what Christmas is about for me.  Christmas is about my messiah, my savior, my shepherd, coming to live in this dirty, sinful Earth, so that he could die as the perfect sacrifice as an adult.

As if being born in a barn wasn't humiliating enough for the Son of God, he proceeded to live his life in servant hood and die a willing death for the world's sins even though he had lived a perfect life.  I don't know about you, but I think that my Savior's birth is pretty fanflippingtastically amazing and should be celebrated more than just once a year.  We should be celebrating it every day of our lives.
We should want to show others his love whenever we see them.  We should want to be servants to others around us so that they can experience his love.

Please know that I'm not saying we shouldn't be grateful for gifts and family and snow.  I just think that Christmas is about something much deeper than any of that.  My family can actually tell you that I haven't been super excited for Christmas these past few years, and it really comes down to what Christmas is about.  I am tired of seeing commercials with Santa and toys to buy.  I don't want to decorate a tree that is going to have to be undecorated in a couple of months or buy a toy that will only be broken in an hour.  I want to celebrate the birth of my Savior.  I want to tell others about the significance of his birth, the greater significance of his death, and the Amazing Splendiferousness of his resurrection.

Living in Reckless Abandonment for Jesucristo,

Jo