Vlog 14: Zombies continues!

Vlog 12: Zombies begins!

Vlog 11: It's my favorite number!

It's green! =D

Vlog 9: Marines! som'm like that.

Vlog 8: Rockstars from Mars!

Vlog 7: Choir tour.

Vlog 6: Onomatopoeia Dragon!

Guard your heart.

"Guard your heart above all else,

for it is the source of life." Proverbs 4:23

If you've been a Christian long at all, you've probably heard this verse. Even if you aren't a Christian at all, however, you've probably heard advice like it; let's face it, whether this country was founded as a Christian one or not (which I don't believe it was), Christianity certainly has influenced our cultural heritage, and many idioms, sayings and beliefs stem from verses in the Bible. However, for as much as we all have heard this verse, I would take a gamble to say that nearly every time you heard it referenced it was taken out of context.

Before I get to that, I'll break down what we've always heard it to mean. An example would be easiest, so I'll start with that. Say you're a girl (or guy) who likes someone, and wants to date them. You go to your parents or friends, and somewhere in the conversation, they advise you not to rush into things, to "guard your heart." We have taken this verse to mean guard your heart from other people. Let's face it though, none of us want to get hurt, and there are many untrustworthy people out there! But is this what the Bible is really saying with this verse? Is God advising us to keep closed until we have learned that we can trust someone?

While this may be practical advice, this is not what the verse is saying. In fact, if I had time and had a more fully thought-through argument, I'd say that in the end it's not even practical advice; you'll get just as hurt in the end with a "guarded heart" from someone. But I won't get into that. Instead, lets take a look at the verses before and after this one. They say,

"My son, pay attention to my words;

listen closely to my sayings.

Don't lose sight of them;

keep them within your heart.

For they are life to those who find them,

and health to one's whole body.

Guard your heart above all else,

for it is the source of life.

Don't let your mouth speak dishonestly,

and don't let your lips talk deviously.

Let your eyes look forward;

fix your gaze straight ahead.

Carefully consider the path for your feet,

and all your ways will be established."

Now, nowhere in here do I even hear a slight reference to how we are to be when loving other people. In fact, in even more surrounding verses before and after these that I posted, Solomon has been and continues to talk about walking a straight path and not straying into evil. Solomon is saying to guard your heart from evil, from letting wicked thoughts and actions fill your life. He isn't saying to guard it from people.

So what? Shouldn't we still guard our hearts? I suppose, in the sense that none of us should be absolutely foolish, especially around those that have proven untrustworthy. But don't look to this verse to prove that you should "take a relationship slow" or keep disconnected from another person; I believe we are all made different, even relationally. I for one get connected to people very quickly (and, if you haven't figured out already, I'm not talking about simply romantic relationships), and while that may leave me hurting sometimes, pain isn't sinful, nor is it even something to be avoided. Pain teaches us lessons and can raise our compassion for others' pain, so I believe that those like me who get connected to others quickly shouldn't feel ashamed of it. We can hurt, and then we can be a blessing to those hurting. Nowhere in God's word does it say to be slow to care, and I look forward to showing care to even the random strangers in my life that I have just met, and especially to those who I have known for a while and do care about deeply. I'm not going to stifle that for anyone.

Shalom.

ACR Homes Interview

Vlog 4: That's not Wal-Mart. . . .

Vlog 3: Zombie RPG

Minecraft!

Hey everyone, I've decided that I'm going to take a break and not make a vlog today. I just don't have a whole lot to talk about right now anyway. But it has definitely been a good weekend, and I hope all of your weekends are going well also.

So, I did get minecraft a few days ago, and it is awesome! Seriously, anyone who has heard of this game should get it asap, and if you haven't heard of or seen it then look it up. It looks extremely simplistic, and it kind of is, but it provides the simple pleasure playing with legos once did in a more interesting way. The central focus is on creativity, exploration and survival, if you decide to let the little monsters roam your world. While there isn't a whole lot of action in fighting, which isn't a problem since most of the time you'll want to avoid monsters anyway unless you're farming for a resource they give, watching your little "safety hole" in the beginning turn into a cave, castle, bunker or whatever else you want to make it is immensely satisfying.

For those wondering how I am doing in my own game, I have a pretty good "home" set up that resembles a bunker (at least to me). I've contemplated putting a giant sword on top of it made of steel iron and calling it the sword base, lol, but maybe not. Later, much much later, I'd like to dig out all the dirt and stone that I'm leaving and replace them with iron blocks.

I also have another mine that I started where I farm some sand, because my base has needed a bit of glass. In this other mine (which I only had built so I could stay safe at night and not have to travel back and forth hauling sand back to my base) I have dug to the bedrock and made a number of other branching paths. I think it may be bigger than my bunker at this point.

Anyway, I think that's all I have to talk about for this blog post. I hope you all enjoyed reading it. Shalom!

Vlog 2- Your first glimpse of my room!

Faith and Writing

I mentioned on my vlog that I was going to post the devotional I gave for my Advanced Writing of Fiction class, so here it is! Thank you all for reading, and shalom!

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Faith and Writing

Going to a Christian college, it’s easy to get inundated with all the Christian ways to do things. Every class tries to incorporate God directly into what they’re teaching in some way, all the writers on the newspaper seem to feel the need to reference God or Jesus at least five times in their articles, and then there’s the chapels every day, where they encourage you to go even more to some Christian evangelizing event or whatnot evening. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a bad thing, it just is what it is. It comes with the territory of going to a Christian college that we all signed up for and even likely wanted. Now, in writing class, we are asked to contemplate faith and writing and how they affect one another.

The concept of faith and writing is rather simple to me anymore, though it wasn’t always. Before I understood faith, or if I really even had it, I would have broken some synapse in my mind trying to figure this one out. But now, to me it seems, faith and writing isn’t something you do, it’s what you live. I believe that if you have faith, writing your faith will be like breathing; it’s going to happen. I say this because who can honestly say that their biases and worldview and beliefs don’t make it into their own writing in some way or another? To write differently from what you believe, truly differently, you would have to become a different person in the most literal sense. Tolkein didn’t set out to write some Christian novel, and I hear even C.S. Lewis wasn’t planning Narnia to be the allegory that it was, but both wrote compellingly beautiful novels that speak to us of God’s love and the struggle between good and evil.

Many young authors feel like they need to directly reference God in their stories, and squirm a little bit when someone asks what their story is going to say about God or if it even has Christian characters. They hesitantly answer that they don’t know to the first question, and “no” to the second, and contemplate scrapping the idea for something that will be a little more “Christiany.” I believe their stories already were. Should we honor God by writing worlds that he didn’t create? And I’m not talking about fantasy here so much as who people are and what they really do. What lessens people really take from day to day life, and what is simply too disgusting for them to believe in their pain. We all like the characters who stick with God unquestioningly when faced with hardship, but how many people really do that? Don’t most rather whine and complain, like Job did? Or doubt, like Thomas, claiming that they must see God’s hands before they will believe? And what does God’s faithfulness really look like? Does everyone get what they want, and then sing praises in the streets in the end? Or rather, is it a subtle learning of love that takes place in their life when they learn of the grace that God has for them, soon or long after learning of their wickedness?

To write faith into one’s stories I would say, then, simply requires one to have faith. To know God, and then faith and writing will happen.

Vlog 1- Train!

Here is my first vlog! I thank you all for watching this, and look forward to getting better.

Music video, head spins and an orientation leader application.

Well, it's done. I have officially applied to be an orientation leader for the upcoming Freshmen of 2011 in the fall! Whoooo! Okay maybe not that exciting to some of you, but I think it's pretty sweet. I just gotta go to some interview tomorrow or Friday, and then they'll call me or something and tell me whether I'm fit to be one or should try applying for the clown position. Hopefully I get orientation leader, because I'm obviously not too terribly funny.

Peer critiques for that short story I mentioned were today too. I'm not certain I like my story much, and it seemed that neither were my peer critiquers, so that's fun.

Also, I may be in a friend's music video! His name is Christopher Spang, a good friend of mine, and he's a really good rapper. His band is Cohort, and they'll be coming out with some sort of album sometime soon. The music video wasn't for any of that, though, just a class he's doing, so unless you're friend with me on facebook, or find it on youtube, you probably won't get to see it. I may post a link in the next blog if I remember.

Ummm, I tried doing a head spin last night too. It went well, I think, for my first attempts, though all day today it's felt like I have a bruise on the top of my head. After it stops hurting I'll have to try some more; I was told I had the form down, so I just need to work on my balance.

Also new, I'm going to try working on my artistic ability. I wanted to try something simple so that my confidence wouldn't plummet when I did horribly, so I started drawing my own Pon and Zi cartoons (is that what you call them?). I'm still working on the proportions, such as making sure their heads are bigger than their body (lolz), but I kinda like the two that I've drawn so far :). If I ever get a scanner or tablet for my computer I'll try posting some of the stuff I've worked on.

I think that's all I have for this blog post. For those of you reading this, thanks! As always, leave a comment at the bottom letting me know what you want me to write about next, or ways to improve my blog, or any suggestion in general and I'll work on it. Shalom.

The next post in my rather inconsistent blog.

Hey everyone, I'm not going to apologize this time for the last blog post, because I've come to accept that I'll probably be just posting in this inconsistently. As such, so should you at this point, and all will be well! I even think that the title of this blog post has inspired me to the title of my blog now.

Okay, so maybe you've noticed in my small amount of writing up to this point, or maybe you haven't, but I'm kind of out of it right now. This is just a forewarning. I've been trying to write a story that's due tomorrow, and I don't even have enough sense right now to know if I like it or think it's good or not. So, I'm going to do the responsible thing, and put the rest of it off until tomorrow. I've got about 1000 words right now, and the minimum word count is 2000, and this is just a rough draft. I think I can churn out 1000 more words before class tomorrow, though the first 100o took me about two and a half hours, if I am to believe that I started at seven thirty.

What I'm writing about is this guy who has had this friendship with this girl about three years ago. His name is Levi, hers is Stacy. It ended messily, and now, three years later, she is on a college visit and happened to visit the college he currently goes to. The whole story takes place in a coffee shop, there the reader is to infer that he asked her to meet him sometime during her visit. Initially, I thought he wanted to invite her there to ask her if she really cared about him all those years ago, or if it was just pity, but now I believe he asked her there because he wanted to apologize. He has apologized before, but he believes he finally knows now what he has to be sorry for, and that he didn't know before, and he hopes that the apology means something to Stacy as well. Maybe he still wants to hear her say that she cared about him back then, maybe he doesn't, but one of the things he is apologizing for is that he didn't believe back then that she had cared, and didn't realize how much that must have hurt her. She doesn't know what to do with the apology at first, and to be honest, I don't know what she will want to do with it period.

The problems I already see in this story are that I don't know why she agreed to meet him in the coffee shop (or even how he gained the courage to ask), it seems contrived that she visits the college he goes to, and I don't know whether there will be a climax or not, or if it will be good enough, or feel contrived or floppy (as in, doesn't affect the characters that much in the end).

I actually started another, different, story about the same two characters, so I may be able to fall back on that one if this one doesn't turn out.

Shalom!

Beiber is cool in my book.

I didn't spend Valentine's Day with any significant other (I don't have one) or by celebrating "Singles Awareness Day" (a distasteful show of complains and discontent most of the time in my opinion). This year, went to see the new Justin Beiber movie with a couple of girls I met on the campus shuttle.

I asked them what they were doing going to the mall (which was my destination as well), and they replied that they were planning to see the movie and invited me to go along. At first I was tempted to decline; this would equivocal to social suicide, or at the very least a few months of hard teasing from a number of my friends, after all. However, my desire to do something exciting with my night won out, and I quickly agreed to go along with them. I figured I would at the very least learn something relatively culturally relevant out of going, even if it was a culture most people chose to despise. What I found in the movie I was pleasantly surprised with.

For those who don't know, the movie is actually a documentary about Beiber, and more than hearing only about the rise of a musical sensation, I saw a fun loving kid who had been blessed with a musical talent and love from a very young age. The home videos of this child touched me deeply in many ways. One of the ways that they touched me was by moving my desire to have a child or children whom God blesses. It may seem weird, but watching young Beiber grow up to be a sensation got me thinking about when I have kids, I want them to be liked and to find something that they love doing and are good at. I don't know how much more there is to write on this; the desire is so deeply personal that I probably couldn't do it justice.

But the fun loving Beiber also encouraged me in the way he and those around him live life. They want to be a blessing to others and to point others towards hope. Before shows one of the managers typically goes out to hand out free tickets to girls (typically; that is the fan basis), and these aren't back seat ones either. Typically they are in the front row. On top of that, one of his traditions with one of his songs, the title of which is escaping me right now (I've just started listening to his music), is to bring up a girl to the stage and serenade her with it. You can see the joy expressed on the faces of those whom he blesses in such an unbridled way. They can't contain it.

When you combine their actions into his music you can hear the same heart. It may sound like shallow teenage relationship music, and on some level it is, but there is a reason we struggle with such things as young people; our interpersonal relationships with others are important. We forget how far encouraging words and actions go. We forget that inside peoples facades of confidence and self-dependance, we all want to be enjoyed and noticed. In our younger teenage years this is expressed in trying to find a member of the opposite gender to fill the gap, but I saw in Beiber's documentary just how far having a loving and supportive family and cast got him. They were people that believed he could do great things and encouraged him to reach for them rather than stifling him with doubts.

I dunno, I'm sounding kinda rambly, and that's because it's past midnight here, but it's also because there were so many things that this movie caused me to think about and ways that it encouraged me to be encouraging and to love life and those around me living it. I've determined to write a commitment to myself to work towards my own hopes and desires in faith in the Lord, and one of those desires is to provide encouragement to others. Much like Beiber, I would like to do it through music and entertainment. Rather than contributing to discouragement in the world through criticism, though I admit there is place for criticism, I want to build up. If you're wondering what I'm talking about because, as I've said, I've been a bit rambly, just go see the movie. You won't likely regret it. Shalom.

I found a PINK PEN!

Hello again everyone! As always, I am very pleased to see you reading this blog. Yes, that's right, I can see you reading it where you sit, because I am a ninja like that.

No I'm not, I'm just kidding. You can stop looking over your shoulder now.

So today, I decided to sit in a booth in the dining area of Naz (which is a building at the college I go to, for all you non-NWC students). Basically, I was doing homework, while simultaneously not doing homework. I know, I'm just that skilled!

Anyway, I decided before supper started to take a walk, and that walk led me to the campus bookstore, where I just decided to walk in and look at stuff. I mean, you might as well look at things while randomly walking around and not doing homework, right? I went to the supplies, and I found a PINK PEN! And I was like "Oh my goodness! This is just what I have always wanted for like, the past three seconds that I've seen it was here!" And so I bought it, along with an orange sharpie highlighter and another ink pen, since I seem to bleed those things dry.

I am looking forward to writing so many things with this pink pen! I'm gonna write letters, and thank you notes, and all sorts of things! Okay, not really to the thank you notes. Unless you happen to get me something for my birthday, which is actually coming up because it's February 19. So, if you do get me something for my birthday, I will write you a thank you note, and sign it, and then one day when this blog is famous and all sorts of other writing of mine is famous you can totally sell it on ebay, or craig's list? and be all like "I knew that guy! I bought him a birthday present and now I have this thank you note worth millions of dollars!" Or something like that. I'll even write it with the PINK PEN!

Anyway, that's all I got for tonight. As always, if you have any questions, suggestions, or anything else you'd like to say to me, leave a comment! So far, I have like, zero comments for most of my stuff, and that's just not fun. Mostly because it probably means no one is reading this. But if you are, comment! I may write you a thank you note for that even with the pink pen if you do. Shalom!

Post Blog Notes

I suggested last night that I would maybe not be finishing that "What are you chasing?" series, and it is a definitive not-gonna-happen now. Looking back at my notes, which are pretty much single sentences for each idea, I don't have the slightest clue what I wanted to say. Well, rather than the basic premise, and I just don't feel like rethinking all that stuff. I much prefer new ideas, so out with the old!

Also, I will add a picture of the pink pen either to this blog later, or to my next blog so all of you can see its amazing pink-ness.