Chicago!

Balance Overdrawn

Do you ever feel like you're committed to a few too many things?  Like you spend more time on extra activities than schoolwork, the reason you're going to college?

The last two days have been hectic, and tomorrow will be just as bad.  This is due to a busy schedule and several events that are normally later in the week that were pushed up to compensate for my absence from campus on Thursday through Saturday because of a trip to Chicago.  Another side effect of this trip is the requirement to have all of my homework for Friday done by tomorrow night.  This means more homework in less time, but I haven't even done very much homework yet because of the crazy schedule.

There are many times where I wonder what it'd be like to be a student at college who isn't involved in any extra-curriculars or other nonsense.  I know they exist, and I must confess that I'm quite envious of their ability to have a "How I spend my day" pie-graph that has plenty of time for academics while still fitting in this thing called free time.  Today, from 5 o'clock to 10 o'clock, I participated in 4 different activities which had nothing to do with academics.  I don't want to list all the things I'm in to brag about how busy I am and how you should feel sorry for me (or do I?), but most of the time I feel like my pie graph has pieces that are hardly worth eating because they just take up space from the more important pieces and suck little bits of the limited taste-goodness from other pieces.  Eventually, with enough things sucking the flavor out of the important parts, the whole pie gets bland and you're basically just eating a dirt pie.  That's a terrible analogy.

Why don't I just quit some things?  Beats me.  GIFT is good, but it makes Sundays not-so-restful.  Intramurals are a "study break", but there are days where homework is a actually a break from everything else.  I like to have something to do, but where's the line between being occupied and being busy?  Even when I'm not bogged down by commitments (like Christmas break), I have a list of things I want to do.  Stupid Dutch Protestant work ethic.  It'd be nice to have a little more time for something that hasn't been scheduled for me or assigned to me by other people.  I know I should take advantage of these chances because I won't have the same opportunities after college when my life will likely consist of almost completely work and time at home after work.  Right now, the thought of coming home at 6 with no obligations sounds like a better deal.

Sometimes I think I would be learning exponentially more if I could read my textbooks and do homework to understand  instead of to get credit.  Sometimes I think that I'd really like to be able to read books for liesure and finish songs I've started writing and create computer programs just for fun.  Sometimes I think I'm not really enjoying college because enjoyment isn't written in the mental schedule I keep in my head.

I was going to complain about how no one blogs anymore

but then somebody did.  And I realized I haven't written in over a week myself.  oh

Song for a Saint

Before you read this post, I need you to follow this link or copy-paste it, whatever it takes to open this page.  Listen to it as you read.  If you finish before the song is done, close your eyes and let it play out.  If it ends before you've read everything, play it again and keep reading.  Thank you.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUgoBb8m1eE



Ever since I started doing anything, my grandparents always loved to see me do it.  Sports, musical instruments, that awesome Lego spaceship I made; the list goes on.  I'd play instruments once in a while for special occasions, but that never seemed to be quite enough for one of the grandparents.  I can't remember anything that got my Grandma Bierma quite as excited as wanting to hear me play my saxophone.  I was always quite reluctant to do so, though, and didn't end up doing it very much at all.  She'd come to my concerts when she could, but she kept getting older and eventually, attendance was no longer possible.  With this came regular reminders that she would love to hear me play my saxophone again.
     Back in high school, I was much more serious and interested in playing guitar, but that didn't come up very often compared to the saxophone requests.  I could never figure out why, because the guitar seemed so much more exciting than a slightly-revved up version of a hymn played on the saxophone.  Nevertheless, she persisted; she didn't ask every time I saw her, but I could figure every couple months that somehow the topic would come up.  And I would always say that maybe I'd do it sometime, that maybe I'd come up with a song or two to play for her.  I intended to do it, but I never really put any effort into it.
     She continued to age, and I still didn't play for her.  I don't know why I couldn't take the time to show up at her room for 15 measly minutes to play her even the easiest song on saxophone, knowing that would be enough for her.  I wish I would have given it a little more effort, to spend some time with her and bring a remarkable amount of joy to her day and receive from her an undeserved amount of praise for my talent.  But I never did.  I meant to, but I never did.
     Last year, during band tour during the end of Christmas break, she got pneumonia and was sent to the hospital.  She'd been declining for the last ten years, the way people do when they've lived 90 years.  This wasn't the first time my parents had told me that she might not live past the week, so I again braced myself for what might happen and proceeded with life.  Her condition worsened as I returned, and I spent the week receiving updates from my mom about Grandma's state.  This time it seemed she was reaching the end of her time here.
    Friday morning, January 15, I woke up to news that Henrietta Bierma packed up and headed home during the night.  Sorrow and relief mingled, knowing that my grandmother wasn't with us anymore, but was free from breathing tubes and walkers and medication and the myriad of pains and problems she'd been pressing on through for over a decade.  We couldn't visit her every Sunday after church and answer the usual questions about how our week went and what we were doing in school, but we didn't have to listen to her scratchy voice aching for healing.  We couldn't host our family gatherings at her nursing home anymore, but we didn't have to watch her hobble and shake or be pushed in a wheel chair longing for strength again. She was home.
      The day she died, I was supposed to play in our concert band's tour homecoming concert at Dordt.  I could have skipped, but I didn't see any reason to miss it.  I showed up and went through the concert routines as usual, thinking it just another concert, except with a little heavier heart.  However, as we moved through the repetoire, we came upon Elgar's Nimrod from the Enigma variations, and in that instant I knew that this song meant something much more than it did when I played it in rehearsal the day before.  I always liked the piece, but tonight, each phrase, each elementary quarter-note expression, so simple yet something she still would have loved to hear coming from my instrument, rose up from the stage.  I remembered my promises to play for her, and poured my heart into each note to make up for her almost-deaf ears dying without hearing me play for her.  The piece built and built, culminating in a climax worthy of heaven's choirs.  The final crescendo to the peak chord shot heavenward from out of the roof of the auditorium, and in that moment, I knew, I wholeheartedly believed that my grandmother listened with uninhibited ears and rejoiced at the sound as she left this world.  I didn't play my saxophone for my grandma while she lived, but as ascended to heaven's glory,  I played for her.
 

Dear Blank, Please Blank

Lately, I've come to see that I'm a very needy pray-er.  I think this might stem from my childhood where prayer was mostly  "Dear God, please be with this person and the people in the hospital and....." and "Dear God, thanks for my friends and my mom and Jesus....".  As a kid, prayer consisted of please and thank you, but not much else, which happens to make a pretty lousy conversation.  But a conversation I feel I've kept having.  My prayers, long or short, tend to stick to a pretty direct ask-thanks pattern, and I know that there's a lot more to talking to God than that.  Sometimes it feels more like a relationship with a cashier at a restaurant,  "I'll have this and that, thanks", than a conversation with someone I know, "Hey how ya been, what's up."  Prayer is  a good way to show some trust in Him, but as I said, I tend to seem needy when it comes to prayer.  I'm not sure how to feel about this.  After all,

If you remain in me, and my words remain in you,

ask anything you wish and it will be given you.

-Jesus

There are several ways this can be distorted and twisted to make us think we get what we want, but it still remains true.  And look at the Lord's Prayer.  I'm no grammar buff, but most of that prayer is in the imperative mood.  Give us, forgive us, lead us, deliver us.  It starts with praising God and praying for His kingdom, and then the meat and potatoes is about us and our neediness.  I'm really not sure what the perfect prayer looks like, but I'm assuming Jesus knows what he's doing, so I'll keep asking God, and I'll keep thanking God, and I hope I can drop the fast-food conversation feeling and dig in deeper.

God comforts the disturbed, and disturbs the comforted

I feel compelled to share a dream that I actually remember quite vividly,even after a week, unlike most of my other dreams.

So there I was, in Sioux Falls or some other reasonably-large city, with several of my cohorts, who will remain unnamed mostly because I cannot remember who they were.  We found one hundred dollars somewhere, but we decided that we should give it to some people who needed it more than us.  Soon after, we spotted a homeless shelter/soup kitchen, so we decided that'd the place if anywhere where we could find people who could use money.  We walked in, and the first thing I noticed was Jory Kok having a dance party with some friends.  I thought this was quite an odd occurence in a soup kitchen.  Anyways, we sat down and looked around the place, which was quite full of people.  There were quite a few people who were obviously quite poor, and most of them walked around as if they weren't psychologically sound, which was strange.  However, seated in several other booths were other people I knew, just hanging out and eating as if this was a normal restaurant.  I was quite disturbed at this point, and this was aggravated by the manager of the soup kitchen, a rather frazzled, tired-looking woman, who left the soup pot where she was serving from to feed us ice cream sundaes instead of continuing to feed the people.  The worst part was, we accepted the sundaes as if there was nothing out of the ordinary about it and joined some other friends hanging out.  We began on a mission to help others, and ended up forgetting them for our own selfish gain.


I woke up with my head spinning; there are so many things wrong with that dream that I could comment on.  My subconscious view of people in poverty, our society/church's reaction to poverty, our sometimes casual attitude toward the imbalances in our society, the condition of the unfair food distribution that we take part in every day.  This semester several books and a speaker have really taken jabs at me in my comfortable middle class life and my view and reaction to those who are below the lower class.  I've felt twinges of guilt and anger about poverty, but I think the last 4 months or so have changed those twinges to pain sometimes.  I wish I would do more, but I've yet to actually do something besides rethink buying stuff when I shop.  I think the dream just showed me what my life might look like right now.  It bothered me.  And I hope it continues to.

Forehhhhhvvver young, I want to be, forever young

Do you ever really, really wish you were young again?

We watched home videos from childhood tonight.  My youngest sister is obsessed with these-- she can say what's going to happen and where all the funny parts are in each scene of the tape --that's how much she loves them.  I didn't think I'd watch because I tend to have this burning desire to be productive with everyone second of the day (except when I kill excessive amounts of time on the intraweb), but I saw just a little bit and got suckered into two hours of laughing, laughing, and lots of reminiscing.  I don't know how in the world my parents put up with such an imaginative, controlling, and very loud kid, but it sure looked like I enjoyed it.
And that just makes me think of how different life was then.  I spent every single day hanging out with my siblings, most of the time playing "Let's pretend..." or any assortment of creative activity.  Life was so carefree.  And fun.  It just looks...beautiful.  Plus, I was actually kind of cute for a little bit back then, if I dare say that about myself.  Mostly just in pictures, though.  On video, the demeanor kind of overrides the cuteness.
Fast forward to now after rewinding to then.  Life is stressful, full of big decisions, big responsibilities, big everything.  Yeah, there's great things we can do and fun times we have that we can't when we're young, but when we're young, we're so caught up in living that most of the time we forget about everything else.  Our whole lives are ahead of us, and our dreams can literally stretch just as far as our imaginations.  Those dreams of being an NBA star from small-town nowhere are fed with every basketball that slips through the rusted rim clamped to our garage.  Those dreams of being an archaeologist finding the latest discovery from eons ago are kept alive every time an old silver spoon is discovered and dug out of the lawn.  The possibilities are limitless in our minds, even if not in real life.  The only rationale for pursuing anything is because we want to.  We are not held back by anything but our age, and we don't hold ourselves back by what we can or cannot do.  Life is beautiful.
Life is still beautiful today, but I feel as though we often glimpse it through a pane tainted by reality's setbacks and troubles.  Sometimes, though, these problems only enhance the beauty we experience.  But our eyes never return to that innocent view of the glorious world we live in.  Our lives can still be good, but our youth still remains unlike any other time of our lives.  Ecclesiastes 12  says

"Remember also your Creator in the days of your youth, before the evil days come and the years draw near of which you will say, "I have no pleasure in them"

and while I don't think my life has no pleasure in it, I do know that I would love to return to that state of youth before some days became a chore and seemed to have the joy sucked out of them.  No matter, though, because I can't return.  I can only remember those days and try to  borrow a little joy from them for today and the future.  I can't wait to watch the kids I hopefully will have someday experience their youth so I can watch this phenomenon of youngness not in retrospect on a television, but in real time as they grow up and I get to be with them while they do it. 

Yeah, life isn't what it used to be, but I can dream about it, right?  When I invent a time machine I know where I'll be heading for a visit.

Stereotypical New Year Post

So...this last year...2010...yup.

I feel like nothing particularly explosive or revolutionary happened this year.  Looking back, here is a list of things.  I think I'm usually not all that fond of lists like this, but I just decided to make one.  I have no idea.  So here's some things.  I'm not sure what their significance is.

• I decided to doom my next 3 years of college by remaining an engineering                                    major.  But at least its computer engineering so its less sucky?
• I dated a pretty cool girl.  We're not dating anymore, but we've avoided for the most part post-dating awkwardness, hatred, threats on eachother's lives, etc., so it worked out okay and we're still good friends.
• Much to my chagrine, I worked on the farm again.  I tried to get a different job, but I couldn't find one.  Positive bonus of living on a farm: you always have a job to fall back on.  Negative bonus of living on a farm: you always have a job to fall back/get roped into every break from school.
• My two best friends and I went on a roadtrip.  One of those legitimate ones you see in movies.  Except ours was probably a lot less adventurous and debaucherous than those.  But I think we had more fun.  Go look at our pictures on facebook.  Permission to stalk granted.
  
  • Drove through South Dakota, Wyoming, and the eastern side of Montana.  Turns out, there's a reason almost no one lives there.
  • Visited a friend in Montana
  • Stayed in Glacier National Park for a few days.  That was fantastic.  Probably the most beautiful setting in the world.  Gorgeous.  Also, camping was fun.  Bouncy, bouncy, bouncy.  There's an inside joke we'll be talking about when we're 80.
  • Moved on to Kennewick, Washington to visit then-girlfriend.  The ugly side of Washington, but it was a fun visit
  • visited BJ's brother in Lynden.  I also cliff-jumped for the first time.  That was cold, but definitely awesome.  One of the highlights of the trip
  • Visited my roommate from freshman year in Mt. Vernon.  We relaxed and did some boating.  This was an awesome close to the trip.
  • Drove back straight through to get home.  30 hours?
  • Seriously, one of the best things in my whole life.  Over 4,000 miles of driving, but it was well worth it.  There was so much craziness and seriousness all jumbled together in 9 days.   All the laughs and memories trekking cross-country with Bj and Trevor will stay with me forever.  This is gunna be one of those stories my kids hear a lot of.
• Returned to college and met some more people, did some stuff, learned a little..the usual
 

I can't think of anything else exciting or interesting, which means I must be either boring or forgetful.  It was a good year, and I'm looking forward to the new one.  I'm sure there will be plenty of exciting occurences, and so far there's already quite a bit of traveling planned, which makes me excited for more adventures.  Thanks for reading this year and keep coming back.

That feels like a very cheesy way to end this blog.  And a cheesy way to begin the year.  Oh well.