He is Mighty to Save

So, I was taken out to a concert on a date with my lovely girlfriend Kristen and some friends (Evan and Shantelle) Jeremy Camp and Jeff Johnson.
Jeff Johnson I had a lot of respect for as a fellow worship leader (not that I do that too much any more) and Jeremy Camp most Christians under the age of 30 in America know about.
Something happened while listening to Jeff Johnson that has not happened in a while: I enjoyed Mighty to Save.
You know the song. Everyone knows the song now. People can't stop playing it, which I don't mind, it's a fabulous song.
But I've stopped enjoying it.
People don't understand that song when they play it, and they BUTCHER the way the song is meant to be built up and emphasized. I've heard it played at my church back home in Dallas, and they play it the same way Hillsong does: They play the "shine your light and let the whole world sing" part like 4 million times, at maximum volume and strength.
Now, you can disagree with me, but I completely think that is the least important part of the song. They don't understand that all the choruses (or chori, whatever) are meant to be quiet and built up, like the verses, and then the bridge is supposed to be the SHORT interlude where it builds up momentum to the final chorus and we declare that He is Mighty to Save!
It's such an exciting song, and people recognize that, but they waste the emphasis on building up from a quiet start. Plus they play it way too fast.
Jeff Johnson was amazing at building and working through the song and he had some great stuff to say about it and it was powerful.
I kind of wish we had a bigger vocabulary of standard, everyone-knows-them-and-loves-them worship songs so people could just use them at the right moment and we'd have enough songs that one would always perfectly fit the mood.
This was like the second time that song has actually been at the right moment for me.

Also, Jeremy Camp is an amazing worship leader, which I totally did not expect. I hate his voice on the albums but he is powerful to hear.

I Am the Field of Wheat

My passions are so easily swayed.
I love so many things, as weird as that sounds.
I love guitar, I love bass guitar, I love piano, and lots of other instruments that I don't really play.
I love pencil sketching, it's my favorite type of art even though I'm terrible at it.
I love philosophy and theology and psychology and how they interrelate.
I love sports! I just never play as much as I want to. Volleyball, tennis, frisbee, and baseball are my favorites, not in that order.
I love big complicated math problems because when you solve them, it's just so satisfying.
I love dancing of all kinds, except the one where you hump the air, and I'm not so good at them, except the one where you hump the air, cuz that's easy.
I love building things, and arts and crafts projects.
I love writing stories and letters to friends.
I love foreign languages.

And no, as your 3rd grade Sunday school teacher will tell you, this isn't romantic love or agape love or Jesus and me love, it's "like," but I think it's passionate. I pursue these things.

I've just noticed a lot lately that whenever I see someone doing something that takes practice and is fun to do when you're good at it, I want to do it and get good at it.
Tonight it was the comical performing, I want to make something cool like that. A couple of weeks ago I had all these aspirations of amazing halloween costumes.
I just think there are so many cool things to do and I have the problem of trying to run in all the directions at once and I accomplish very little. But, at the same time, I do accomplish things, because while I'm excited about learning something, it's pretty much the only thing I think about, and I practice for hours.
I don't want to tie myself down and say I'm a guitar person or a tennis person, because I want to dabble in everything. I do admire those who find their one huge passion and get incredibly good at it. I just happen to be incredibly above average at a lot of things instead.
I enjoy it.
Don't get me wrong though, there are a few things which I never get distracted from.

Now Speaking...

So, I love foreign languages.
It was actually my fourth passion, after guitarz, women, and God, in varying orders since high school.
One of the most interesting things about languages to me is that we think in terms of language, at least a large part of the time.
Do I think of the image of coffee when I smell coffee, or do I think, "Mmmm... coffee!"?
Part of that depends on our brain dispositions. The whole left brain/right brain and all that jazz.
But, to a certain extent, many of the deeper thoughts of human emotion and insight are quite impossible without words to express and represent our thoughts.
To that extent, our vocabulary is the limit of our universe.
Can you think of an image of something which you don't have a name for?
You might be able to, after some serious thought, but for the most part we have to label everything we interpret with our senses with a word.
So, in that sense, it creates a large barrier between us and those who speak a different language naturally, because their language focuses on different words and different patterns of thought.
For instance, Americans tend to be more direct and straight-forward in our language. We say things like "Let's go to the movies!" or "Please give me a soda." In an imperative sentence, a command, we assert that we have the right to ask something of someone else. Our language speaks a lot about our culture.
Now, I speak a very slight amount of Japanese. This is a very interesting language to me because it comes from a very old, very different culture. The Japanese, in case you didn't know, are very polite, with the exception of the current generation which is becoming very Americanized.
VERY polite.
They love their personal space and go to great lengths to respect others, even if it's only a matter of formality, because the culture dictates that they do so. The Chinese are fairly similar.
But this appears in Japanese language, as well.
If you asked someone, "Hey, let's go to the movies" in Japan, they might sarcastically reply, "Oh and do you want me to kill all of your enemies and rub your feet while I'm at it?!"
Well, okay, they probably wouldn't.
But they use the passive voice as a much more direct device than we do, which as many of you know is a serious NO-NO in English writing.
They would say, "Would it be nice to be attended at the movies this Friday?" or, "It would be wonderful if I were given a soda by you."
Sounds, weird, right?
But it's funny how little such language and cultural barriers affect personalities as a whole.
In every land and every tongue there are still cruel- and kind-hearted people, generous and stingy, hasty and patient.
It seems that language is more of a tool of our natures than what defines it.
Culture is just a shell.
Foreign languages are awesome, though. Especially if you learn romantic phrases to make your girlfriend smile.

I never thought I'd say it... but I miss community college.

Okay, after the ridiculous process of trying to register for classes, I have officially decided upon some of the downsides of small, private universities.
I spent 30 minutes clicking 'refresh' for the log-in page of the school's intranet server to try and register for a class which had 1 spot remaining only to find that they had mislabeled the prerequisite courses for it and I couldn't sign up for it. Ironically, after an hour, that one spot is still open.
The other courses I could possibly have taken this semester are either already full or I don't meet the prerequisites for them, either. Meaning that I am taking a MAXIMUM of 14 hours next semester unless I do some serious griping at the office, which I may have to do.
The thing is, I miss how easy this process was at every other school I ever went to.
In high school, I could usually beg my way into most classes which were full.
High school was full of people who were driven about their grades, so anyone who wanted to get into a certain pre-AP or AP class could.
A&M had 13 sections of the same class and each class had a capacity of 400.
A&M was just full of people.
Community college gave you a bunch of smaller options and you could usually even get into a class that was full because someone would probably drop it before or during the semester and the spot would be open.
Community college was full of people who didn't care about school.
And now, at my humble little private university, which I love so much (no sarcasm, actually) I can't get into many of the classes that I want because they're all really good classes and people are excited about taking them so they probably won't drop.
Christian college is full of driven people but it's bigger than high school so I can't beg my way in.

Why can't the people at my school be more apathetic!! I wanna take Revelation book study!!!!

I could totally rant about how people, in their selfishness, want other people to be less successful so that they can have all the success... but I won't. Imagine I did, and praise me for my wisdom and insight, would you?

Mmm Friday.

So, I'm definitely looking forward to the rest of the weekend. It's been a long 3 or 4 days. I have a cold/sinus thing.
You know, we as Americans are full of excuses.
Whenever we do something wrong, we always have a justification for it.
My current justification is sickness.
I've heard so many excuses from people who have let me down, and given so many excuses when I make mistakes, that any time I hear one, I think it's really lame. Nobody takes the blame for anything.
My real accusation is that it isn't even necessary to make excuses.
And this includes valid excuses.
"My sister died so I'm sorry I forgot about hanging out with you" does invoke a sense of pity and understanding. Not that this has happened to me, but if it happened to someone I would probably not be mad.
But at the same time, there's a sense that we could still do something to improve the situation.
If someone just admits a fault (Oh, my jolly stars!!!) it grants them a lot more dignity and respect. We have such a need to be understood and make our point known that by making an excuse, we are so busy arguing for ourselves and wanting to feel justified that we totally forget that we have hurt someone else.
Making excuses also kind of puts up a wall between us and other people.
I feel so compelled to hide behind my image and not admit my own weaknesses, but at the same time being unable to be weak in front of another makes me lonely.
It's so funny that we are so eager to admit that humans aren't perfect. You know, when you're in a deep conversation with someone, that's easy to say. But it is so rare that someone simply admits fault once they have actually done something wrong.
So, here's a promise to myself: next time I screw up, admit it and then do better.
How great a testament is it if a person can have a crappy day and still work at meeting someone else's needs. Honor your obligations even when it's hard and you'll never have to make excuses. That takes some serious Holy Spirit juice.

Edited slightly after taking a shower. I always think well in the shower.

Do Realize that Bread is like the Freakiest Thing on the Planet?

Yeah, bread is cooked with yeast, which is the stuff that makes it rise.
Yeast is actually a unicellular fungus. So, it's alive.
At least before we cook it.
I'm just glad it's asexual, so there isn't anything mating on my sandwich.

You know, there have to be so many foods that are divinely inspired or given to us by God himself, because that's just one of those things I know people would not come up with.
No person would ever look at a FUNGUS FROM THE OCEAN and a big grassy looking plant and think, "Hmm, maybe if I grind those all into powder with water and bake it, it'll be yummy!"

It's like that Calvin and Hobbes comic where Calvin is ranting and says, "Who was the guy who first looked at a cow's udder and said, 'I think I'll squeeze these and drink whatever comes out!"
Bill Watterson is a genius.

Anyways, it really disturbs me what is considered edible by the human digestive system.
Baked Fungus Wheat (aka bread, forevermore known as BFW), cottage and bleu cheese, tootsie rolls (which I recently discovered are about 50% wax) and BEANS!!! Ohhhh, I hate beans.

I don't understand how people eat the crazy stuff we do, and then we're afraid of germs and spiders and bird dookie. I just read an article that told me that there is a kind of coffee called Kopi Luwak which is made from cat poo or something like that.
But I am so hesitant to stick my hand in mud or grab a rusty pipe.

It's just a weird little contradiction of ours.

P.S. - I honestly would not drink the cat poo coffee.

School Spirit

So, for all of you impatient people, this blog should be short.
I went to a school basketball game tonight. It was a ton of fun.
Now, I go to a really small private Christian college. I used to go to Texas A&M University, a huge, not-at-all-private-in-fact-they-don't-believe-in-privacy school.
Now, when most people think of A&M, they think of the Aggie tradition. I actually only recently found out what an Aggie is. It's short for Agricultural, which is the A in A&M. M is Mechanical.
Anyways, the traditions of the Aggies are numerous:
- every grade (freshman, sophomore) has it's own cry, which comes from these weird hunting references (whoop!)
- every month there is a big (2,000 people) ceremony to commemorate Aggies who have died in combat
- go to a football game, you'll run into about 500 traditions like yell leaders and the 12th man

And that's just the tip of the iceberg that I learned in just 4 months.

So, I go to this basketball game tonight at my tiny, relatively young school.
We have a couple of cool traditions, for starters. Since it was the first game of the season, we (all 300 students in the crowd) threw toilet paper on the court after we scored our first basket, which happened to be a 3-pointer, thank you very much. It was pretty crazy.
But something interesting happened tonight.
We started a tradition.
Now, it wasn't anything epic; we just made spirit fingers during a free throw for our team, and if we made it, we said, "whoosh!"
But still, the fact that we made a tradition in one night, spontaneously, without any sort of authority or decision by democratic system, is pretty cool.
It's one of the most sought-after human needs to be able to see a visible effect result from our actions. I want to matter. I want to change things. So do you.
I think big, massive, profitable, efficient things like giant schools or Wal-Mart, destroy the human feelings of importance.
It sounds like an obvious thing, but it's different to actually experience it.
I don't know who started that silly tradition, but I hope they feel important. Like they matter.