Ello Ello! I am alive! Though very tired, busy, and a bit overwhelmed. It’s been quite a long time since I last wrote, so we shall see how much I can remember.

Let’s start with one of the reasons I haven’t written in a while. If you are at all into politics, you probably heard about Charile Kirk’s assassination. That affected me a lot. Charlie Kirk was a devout Christian, an amazing thinker, speaker, and someone I admired, someone I had hoped to one day meet. His videos on talking on university campuses had a good impact on my ability to disagree with people. How to, in practical ways, love someone even while disagreeing with them on the very basics of reality. He was someone I believe truly was on a mission for God, and I mourn the fact that his wife Erika Kirk and their young children have lost him.

Moving on, one of the new speakers we had was a man named David Asscherick. He is by far my favourite speaker so far, and it will be quite hard to top him. We had him for two and a half weeks, and we covered a lot of content, but I’ll just share some of my favourites. We went through Genesis 1-17 and chapters 1-15 of the book of Acts with him. We went through it almost line by line. Which was amazing, I thoroughly enjoyed that. One of the interesting things he said was “Genesis 1-11 is the introduction to the bible, Genesis 12 and onwards is just the Abrahamic story.” I found that really interesting and it kinda puts the bible in a slightly different light. We also went over how the covenant is just “land and descendants” and it gets repeated over and over and over again, old and new testament.

In the last two days of his classes, we went over some apologetics and how to make a persuasive 5-part argument on the existence of God, and why that God is one of love.

1. Time, The universe and time had a beginning, which suggests a beginner
2. Life, Life is only observed coming from life, which suggests the beginning of life on earth came from something living
3. Mind, The best explanation for the mind and our ability to comprehend the universe is a divine mind that ours reflects
4. Ought, There are universal oughts and ought nots
5. Love, Gods love can be personally and certainly known

There is so much more content there that I don’t really know how to boil it down, I have pages and pages of notes from David’s classes. The apolitics ones alone were eight hours of class time.

Okay, outreach. Still very much Not My Thing! It is awful and terrifying, and I still have no idea what I’m doing for the days we just go to the city center. I saw a couple of comments about doorknocking and its effectiveness, and I agree with you, it’s probably not the most effective thing we could be doing. Thing is, I don’t really get a choice in doing it or not, I am in the program, it’s part of the program, so I do it. On a slightly different note, it does work some. People are getting bible studies and inviting members of the community to join ur small groups. Including my outreach partner and me. In many ways, though, this style of outreach is just as much about putting us, the students, way outside our comfort zone and learning how to talk about God and spiritual things with people who may not believe in God at all, as much as it is about us finding “seekers”. Same with the other days of outreach. We just get dropped off in the city center, and we disperse and try to start conversations with people. Which is why even though I hate it and I have no idea what I’m doing and I’d much rather be doing something hands-on, I still see value. The style is as much for my benefit as it is for the people I meet. It also forces you to consider if your anxiety and awkwardness are worth keeping the love of God away from someone who is potentially looking for it.

I gave my testimony recently, which was fun. I am so annoyed at myself, though, because I meant to voice record it to see how I did and potentially share it, but I totally forgot. I spoke totally off the cuff for about half an hour and while it felt good and cohesive and people told me I did well I really wish I had gotten it recorded:( On the other hand I have learned I enjoy talking off the cuff and much as I enjoy my very well-planned speeches I do for 4H. Slightly different feeling and a testimony is not a competition, but I really enjoyed it and I am going to be looking for opportunities to do that again.

Living without my family is still incredibly odd, and I am looking forward to going home at the end of this. It’s also so strange to have so little free time, I feel like I have no hobbies anymore; a very new experience for me. Even when I have time, I really am too tired to do anything that requires more thought than scrolling or sleeping.

On the subject of sleeping, I was expecting my body to conform to my new schedule a lot more than it actually does. Apparently, my brain just really prefers to have an 11 or 12 sleep time and wake up around 7:30-9, depending on how the night went. No matter how tired I am, without aid, I am extremely unlikely to fall asleep before 11:30. Also, waking up and just getting up also seems to just always make me feel ill in the morning, as opposed to waking up and dozing for half an hour or so. If I have to wake up before 7:30, even dozing doesn’t make the nausea completely go away, I found that out the hard way. We have duty groups here and one of the duties on rotation is meal prep. We have to be in the kitchen at 7am for meal prep. So, if I take into account some dozing time, I would set my alarm for around 6:30 or earlier. That week just kinda sucked to exist in my body, to be honest. Even when I got enough sleep, I found that waking up that early just seemed to set me up for a bad day. My pain is worse, I am nauseous for the first couple hours of the day, and I get overstimulated wayyyyyyyy easier. Yeah, really just not my thing.

Some helpful things I’ve learned about being in a classroom setting and dealing with overstimulation, though! I get overstimulated lots more than I thought I did. That restless feeling that I thought was just ADHD and my inability to control my focus turned out to actually just be oversimulation. I found out that wearing sunglasses inside helps so much. I was having a really bad day a couple of weeks ago and kept rubbing my face and closing my eyes, and I realized when I closed my eyes, I could hear the speaker better, and I had my sunglasses, so I thought I’d try it just for the heck of it. I was barely paying attention and was not having a great time so why not try it. My goodness, though, did they help! It’s like I could think again. I also keep my headphones with me. You wouldn’t think in a small classroom with a single person talking that there would be much to block out, but on a bad day, there are so many sounds that I don’t even realize are there until they are gone. Stuff like the wind outside, the slight echo of the speaker’s voice, people’s chairs occasionally squeaking, the writing on paper, and so many other noises.

Today we had a new speaker named Angelo. His classes are titled, Faith, Trauma and Healing. His class was pretty interesting. We went over faith and its definition today. We also went over what worship is, how and why people operate the way that they do. He had this really interesting way of illustrating how people work. He used a triangle, and at each point is something different: the Center of power, the Story, and the Values. If all three of those things aren’t aligned correctly, then that is how we end up with idolatry. Angelo’s example from his own life was, Power was the TV, Value was Comfort, and Story was Trauma. So in his life, the TV was his center of power because it provided him with the comfort he valued, and he valued comfort because of his trauma, and all of that led to idolatry.

We also went over Stages of Faith. I also really enjoed that and found it intriguing. The stages are

1. Fantasy faith, God is a superhero
2. Barter Faith, everything is black and white, I do good I get good
3. Conformity Faith, I belive it because my pastor does, because my church does, because my friends do
4. Personal Faith, I ask questions and need to know everything for myself
5. Paradoxical Faith, You dont need to have all the answers but are certain anyways
6. Universalizing Faith, you don’t need to ask questions at all, you are happy to just be a conduit for God’s love in everything.

The idea here is not that once you get past a stage, you let go of the one previous, and they are not even necessarily linear, but they are meant to build on top of each other. There is a book apparently all about this stuff called Stages of Faith by James W. Fowler

Angelo’s interesting hypothesis is that not only do people go through these stages of faith, but churches do too, and denominations as a whole. I like the hypothesis, it explains some of my early teenage frustrations with confrence events and the feeling of a lack of maturity for the things I was taught in such events.

Moving on to a completely different topic. The girls here are starting to do some fun things together. The boys do a cookout every Sunday, but it’s a boys-only event. We decided to take inspiration, but instead of a cookout, we did a really nice meal in our house, and it was a lot like a potluck. A few of the girls cooked food from their cultures as well. It was really fun to see and try all of their favourite foods.

I think that’s all I have for now. Feel free to leave comments, I know I don’t respond, but I do love reading them, and some of them helped parts of my writing today. Till next time

-Ahnikha