First Day of the Last Semester

I woke up this morning thinking that it was unnecessary to check the weather because I knew it was just going to be hot and humid. About ten minutes before I had to leave, rain started pouring down. So much for some of the errands I wanted to run. I did, however, stand out in the rain to get my football coupons.

This semester is promising. I am armed with new convictions and priorities. We'll see how well I live everything out. Despite mental and spiritual preparation, I have already managed to make a pretty silly mistake: I sent my parking permit to the wrong apartment number. Somehow it ended up shipping to apartment #29 instead of G. Go figure.

One class down and one more to go for today. I'm pretty excited.

Life has Unity

I was on my way to New Orleans on Saturday morning, and I was listening to NPR. An interesting segment came on that featured a scientist who unlocked a key to determining why there are different life spans in animals. He talked about how every animal has about a billion of heart beats in its lifetime, but the bigger the animal is, the slower the heart beats are, which drags out how long it will live. However, humans are the only exception because we understand how to heal ourselves better and preserve our bodies. The scientist went on to say that he's not a religious man, but findings like this, which show the unity of life, makes him think that there's some higher power that orchestrated life. God is so amazing! Here's the link to the story.

Anyway, I had an amazing time in New Orleans. Everytime I go, I feel that it's going to make a good home. I met some people who go to UNO, and they all had very positive things to say about it. Hmmm, I really hate being so far from Matt. I am excited about being closer. O God! What's the next step?

It's strange not to have to wake up early for work. I've really enjoyed the summer. Saturday, I'll be returning to Tallahassee. My last semester--it's gone by so fast!

Last Day

I am sitting at the empty cubicle on my last day at Navy Federal. It's been an amazing experience. I wasn't sure of what I would be agreeing to, but I'm so glad that I stepped out of my comfort zone so that I could have the best job ever (or at least tied with youth interning last summer). Navy Federal has been so generous to me. All of the employees have taken great care of me and have let me experience what being in an effective team is like. I have learned a lot about employment law, hiring processes, and customer service. More than that, I have learned how to accept and even love all sorts of people. I hope that I can maintain good contact with them!

This weekend I am going to New Orleans to visit Matt. I'm pretty excited to see him one last time before school separates us again. New Orleans is always a fun place to visit.

I have a lot to do before I head off to school. I need to clean out my room, pack up, write thank-you letters, and hang out with some friends. It's my last semester in Tallahassee--I've had a great time, and I've learned a lot. Graduation is at my front door. I do not want to waste time.

My morning

At the beginning of my employment with Navy Federal, I was given my "own space" at the Northview Training Center by K-mart because there was no available space at Heritage Oaks in Beulah. I was told, because I am always at work on time, that the alarm would go off if no one was there in the morning to turn it off. I was never given the code to the alarm because I figured it was a power--or "security"--issue, so I never pressed the matter.

I knew that the one lady who is always early to work at Northview Training Center was going to be out until Tuesday, but I still had hope that the one guy that's always there early too would be there instead. Alas, no one was there. I opened the door and heard the alarm's beeping echoing in the dark office. I immediately shut the door and started calling all the numbers that I could remember. Carol, one of my bosses, called the Security department and told them to disregard the alarm. Everything was taken care of, and I definitely generated a few laughs.


On a different subject: I got a new haircut last night. I really love it! My family said it is the best haircut I have ever had. The hairdresser made my hair so much lighter and tried to teach me how to care for it.

I feel that I am in a very awkward place right now. I'm bored at home, but I think I would be bored in Tallahassee too... I miss having Matt around. I've lost some contact with my old friends, but life's also changing for all of us. Most everyone has paired off with significant others. I am really happy to see everyone's making some progress in life. Life seems to slip away from our grasp before we know it. It's so strange, yet very exciting, to see how people are developing into adults. We're all at that weird stage of life where we don't necessarily want the responsibility of adulthood, yet we want don't want to be considered adolescents. I definitely suffer the weakness of the college-age mentality: distaste for committment. But, I know that I am slowly becoming less scared of it and more longing for something to be a little more established in my life. I don't want the shackles of routine, but I want something that's mine because I worked for it under God's guidance.

Yeah that Vegan...

I went to a vegan potluck thing with a girl I met in Art History like a year ago. It fascinated me... maybe it was the trippy old people who made the food, or maybe the crazy girl I went with, or maybe it was the surprisingly good food that I had the opportunity to taste. Whatever it was, my curiousity was set off.

This being said, I want you to know that I love beans. I mean, I really love beans. I have also been acquiring a taste for Mediterrean - Indian food. Now that my taste buds are ready, I'm going to start cooking.

Beans are a great, and amazingly cheap, alternative to meat. A good portion of my grocery budget goes to purchasing chicken breasts. This semester, I am determined to explore different menus. Matt showed me the wonders of buying frozen chicken breasts in bulk. I will certainly keep my meat like that from now on. My poor George Foreman is probably tired of me using it every evening. It's time for a little vacation for the grill. It's been a good companion, but frankly, it's time for a change.

However. I could be making up for the chicken breast cost with exotic foods and spices costs. We'll see.

There's an amazing amount of resources on the web that provides all sorts of help and recipes for vegan eaters. Not to say that I have given up on meat, but I have found a method of potentially reducing grocery costs while still consuming all of the necessary nutrients.


Well, back to staring at the computer screen at work. I guess I could start studying for the GRE again. I'm counting down the minutes until it's time to go and get my hair cut!

I really want to have a record of this article.

I ran across this article on MSNBC's website. I just about fell out of my chair! I had a feeling that there were more people who felt the same way as I do about art and Christianity. This article definitely describes a lot of my vision.

Evangelicals seek role as ‘creators of culture’
Once wary of pop culture and high art, faithful look to artistic renaissance

MILAN, Italy - There are no crosses in Makoto Fujimura’s paintings. No images of Jesus gazing into the distance, or serene scenes of churches in a snow-cloaked wood.
Fujimura’s abstract works speak to his evangelical Christian faith. But to find it takes some digging.
After the 2001 terrorist strikes on the World Trade Center, three blocks from Fujimura’s home, his work explored the power of fire to both destroy and purify, themes drawn from the Christian Gospels and Dante’s “The Divine Comedy.”

“I am a Christian,” says Fujimura, 46, who founded the nonprofit International Arts Movement to help bridge the gap between the religious and art communities. “I am also an artist and creative, and what I do is driven by my faith experience.
“But I am also a human being living in the 21st century, struggling with a lot of brokenness — my own, as well as the world’s. I don’t want to use the term ’Christian’ to shield me away from the suffering or evil that I see, or to escape in some nice ghetto where everyone thinks the same.”
By making a name for himself in the secular art world, Fujimura has become a role model for creatively wired evangelicals. They believe that their churches have forsaken the visual arts for too long — and that a renaissance has begun.
On the grass-roots and institutional level, evidence is mounting to support that view: Art galleries are opening in churches; prominent seminaries are investing in new centers exploring theology and the arts; and, graduates from evangelical film schools are making Hollywood movies.
These artistic evangelicals, though still relatively small in number, are striving to be creators of culture rather than imitators, said Dick Staub, a Seattle-based radio talk show host and author of “The Culturally Savvy Christian: A Manifesto for Deepening Faith and Enriching Popular Culture In an Age of Christianity-Lite.” There is a desire, he said, to avoid inventing a parallel arts universe with Christian knockoffs for Christian audiences.
“They want to make art that connects to everybody,” Staub said. “The call is first and foremost to make good art.”
‘The Bible is full of abstraction’That doesn’t necessarily mean overtly religious art, but rather art informed by faith. Fujimura, for example, shares more with abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock than with Thomas Kinkade, a self-described devout Christian whose brushwork of idyllic landscapes, crosses and churches are big sellers.
As a result, Fujimura — whose work has been displayed at museums in Tokyo and Washington, D.C. — gets questions from his fellow believers dubious about abstract and modern art.
“The Bible is full of abstraction,” said Fujimura, an elder at a Greenwich Village church he helped start. “Think about this God who created the universe, the heavens and the earth from nothing. In order to have faith you have to reach out to something, to a mystery.”

It isn’t always an easy sell.
Evangelical unease with the visual arts dates to the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century. Andy Crouch, editorial director for Christianity Today’s Christian Vision Project, which examines how evangelicals intersect with the broader culture, notes that Protestantism traces its origins to an era when noses were snapped off sculptures in a rejection of Catholic visual tradition while the word of God was elevated.
Attitudes began to change in the 1960s and 1970s, when Christian theologian Francis Schaeffer and Dutch art historian Hans Rookmaaker challenged believers to emerge from their cocoons and engage the culture, including in the arts.

Now, Crouch said, those ideas are resonating with a younger generation of believers who live in an image-saturated culture. They sense a disconnect worshipping in churches bare of anything that’s visually arresting.
“The very parched nature of evangelical visual culture is making people who have grown up in this culture thirsty for beauty,” he said.
Increasingly, that ground is being explored on seminary campuses. One of the most ambitious examples is the Brehm Center for Worship, Theology, and the Arts at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Calif., founded in 2001 and bankrolled by a $15 million donation from a Virginia couple that earned a fortune in information technology.

The center aspires to be an evangelical arts think tank, with five stand-alone institutes focused upon worship and music, film and moving images, art and architecture, drama, journalism and creative writing, preaching and the study of the “emerging church,” which incorporates painting, dance and other fine arts into worship.
Craig Detweiler, co-director of the center’s Reel Spirituality Institute, said students are fascinated with finding the sacred in the mundane and exploring life’s mysteries. In other words, themes with far-reaching appeal.
“Maybe 20 years ago, young filmmakers wanted to tell stories for their own audience,” said Detweiler, a screenwriter. “Today’s young filmmakers ... find holy moments within mainstream movies and want to create more of the same.
“For too long, Christian art has implied pale imitation,” Detweiler said. “We’re trying to get back to the days of the Renaissance, where the church was the patron of the finest art.”
‘How can I be a Christian and an artist?’In another sign that institutional evangelicalism is taking the arts seriously, a Center for Theology and the Arts was founded last year at the flagship seminary of the nation’s largest Protestant denomination: Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky. The center’s work begins modestly this summer with a workshop drawing parallels between the art of drawing and Bible study, arguing both are about seeing and observing.
“If we as Christians believe that creativity and imagination is a gift from God, why have we neglected it for so many years?” said center director Steve Halla, a former Dallas Theological Seminary professor and a woodcut artist.
Already, evangelicals are exerting greater influence in the film industry.
Even before the success of Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ,” Southern California was home to a Christian screenwriting factory called Act One, an on-the-rise film school at the evangelical Biola University and a film studies center sponsored by the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities.

More recently, evangelicals have turned their attention to the contemporary art world. For the past two years, students primarily from Christian colleges and universities have studied and interned at galleries and graphic-design firms through the New York Center for Art and Media Studies, a satellite of Bethel University in St. Paul, Minn.
“We are not trying to recruit missionaries into New York City or anything like that,” said James Romaine, an art historian and the center’s director. “We’re helping young artists grow and become the best artists they can be.”
Echoing others, Romaine describes an evolution in evangelical thinking about the arts.
“For people of my parents’ generation, there was always a question of, ’Can you be a Christian and an artist?”’ he said. “When I was a student, the question was, ‘How can I be a Christian and an artist, in a philosophical sense?’ Now, there’s a sense of, ‘Let’s get to it. How can I be a part of this art world?”’

© 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

First Post

I gave up on blogging a little over a year ago because I had more personal thoughts that I decided to keep in a personal journal. After living a little more of my life, I have decided that I have some public ideas that I would like to express.

If there is anything that I have learned this past year, it's that life is constantly developing into a wonderful story. God has amazed me with His faithfulness to His promises to me. Every step that I take in the progression of life, I realize it's a step towards destiny. I do not have to be confined to the expectations of my experiences, but I can trust God and live in a way that is deeply satisfying and adventurous.

The end of my undergraduate years is coming quickly. What's next? I hope that it's an adventure in New Orleans where I can study something about which I am extremely passionate. Thank You God for motivating me in ways I couldn't explain--everything is starting to make sense.