All Or Nothing

Attendance Policies: The Great Threat To America

Ok so....attendance policies: Si o no? I hear that academia is the only "pure" profession left. To this I say, uh, negative. Perhaps there are institutions of higher education out there who really and truly care about educating and bettering their students to impact the world in a positive way, but there are far too many that only care about the numbers and the bling-bling - YOU know what I'm sayin' yo. :) No, but honestly, this is ridiculous. In a class today, we got polled on what we thought was an acceptable number of absenses for a MWF class. Some put 5, some put 6, I put an essay on the insanity of having attendance policies altogether. I hope that's what my professor was looking for. I wonder what would happen if someone had the brilliance to suggest that the professors make the classes a little more difficult, teach information that the students would not be able to just get from the website or book at any later date, and abolish all attendance policies. Then, the students who missed class would - gasp - FAIL the tests, and then would perhaps think better of missing classes in the future. But then the student-based faculty evaluations would be bad, because students would actually be failing, and then that might make our university look bad, thus dropping the enrollment numbers, THUS dropping the all-important CASH intake. What was I thinking. (Pearce, I'm not sad, just a little annoyed :) )

Smack!

As I have turned 22 (yikes), gone through some prep for possible law school, and basically forced myself to look at where my life is really going and what I am going to do about it, I have had a tendency to go far beyond my normal personality and get a little scared about what I'm going to do. This little fear kept growing inside, and as soon as I started talking to people about it, I found out that I was most definitely not the only one feeling this way about life. Just as I was on the brink of actually starting to stress out about it (stress is a little bit of a foreign concept to me, go figure (Jason Pearce)), the Lord stepped in and gave me what I like to call a little spiritual smack upside the head. What the heck was I thinking? My life is but a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes (courtesy of James 4:14). I could be the richest, most beautiful, most successful woman that has ever walked the face of the planet, my name and career could be on everyone's lips, and I could be remembered for a hundred years OR I could be a poor and destitute homeless, friendless and hopeless person, with no one to care about me, OR I could be anywhere in the midde. None of it matters even the smallest bit, if I am not doing the LORD'S will at ALL times. Not sometimes, not most times, but all times. Our conception of time and of what is truly important is so skewed that it is hard to make myself understand that hello, my life is a MIST. I mean, I don't even get to be a rain, or even a little drizzle - no, I'm a mist. The only real and lasting thing about me is the incredible, immeasurable privilege of being a child of the living and awesome God, and so any attempt to maximize other aspects of my personality will only result in minimizing my eternal effectiveness.

I Almost Have It...

The haunting notes in a particular piece of music, the scent in a breeze, the fading colors of the edges of clouds after a sunset....They all leave you with the bittersweet deep longing for something, something that you know is the only important thing in the entire universe, but you just don't know what it is or how to grab it. Your heart starts beating in your throat, your whole life flashes before your eyes and fades from what you once thought was color to nothing but greyish emptiness, all paling in the light of this glorious, mysterious, elusive something, and when you almost feel like you can solidify the feeling, it disappears, as quickly as it came, leaving you sitting alone in thoughts that are racing back into reality. Alone with nothing but the memory of something so precious that you either just lost, or never even had, and with the newfound realization that reality is not at all where you want to be, or belong. All the while knowing that someday later on, this exact experience will replicate itself, with the only differences being that the longing will be greater and the sense of lost opportunity will be even worse. Of course one would like to attribute this deep and intense longing to the Lord�s inescapable call, but why would He seemingly tease us with an all-encompassing taste of something we can never describe and then take it right back and send us right back to monochromatic meaninglessness? I love the taste on the tip of my tongue more than I have ever loved anyone or anything, but the knowledge of something so wonderfully and terribly and inexplicably different leaves me grasping at some way to reconcile reality as I have known it to reality as it has been shown to me.

yikes......

yikes......

That is like so totally true!

I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do - this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me who does it. So I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God's law, but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God - through Christ Jesus our Lord!

Some lovely theological reasoning from our good friend Paul, compliments of Romans 7:15-25