Odd things that crack me up; another IE sighting

We had a very encouraging music rehearsal at BMS today. We were practicing our crowning achievement for the Thanksgiving program, Fanfare for Thanksgiving, and on this one part the baritones start by themselves and the altos soon join in. They come in on sort of a difficult note, and so every time it’s about time for them to start, I hear this faint hum. They take their note from one of the baritone notes, and it cracks me up. I mean, it’s great, but it makes me smile. It’s something like what I would do.

I was at a basketball game tonight, and Fresno State was the team playing the Ducks. They’re a team with lots of tall, lean, African-American players. And then they’ve got this white guy who’s like 6-10 and 330 pounds who looks like he’s about 28. It cracks me up because he’s so out of place, he’s so plodding and blue-collar where the others are so graceful and quick.

I sat by a couple whose son went to OSU for Industrial Engineering. Turns out the guy works in an Industrial supply company and they gave me a phone number so I can visit the company sometime.

Two scary things today.

I went about school this morning in a very usual fashion: left home probably a little before 8:00, went to the IME library, puzzled over some homework that was due soon, asked the teacher a hurried question in the hall, got a somewhat satisfactory answer, unsatisfactorily finished the homework, went to class, sat there sweetly, changed my answer to one of the problems as the teacher went over it (just to make sure my conscience wouldn't have a chance to bother me, I noted on my paper what I had done), spoke up once or twice, turned my homework in and marched to the bathroom. It was then I discovered that I had this bunch of hair sticking straight out of my head. It wasn’t just one little hair either, no sirree.

Next scary thing. I typed the name of the IME department head in, and I found I am a fan of search engine web crawlers. The very first link was one to the by-log! I had discussed him in one of my entries some time ago, and there it was before anyone else. Try it: I think it was “Dr. Rick Billo.”

That brings up an interesting point. Face it, if Dr. Billo was my mother or a close friend, I wouldn’t feel free to discuss negative points that I see about him. You know, if there’s something bad I think about someone that I think could run across this, I probably wouldn’t share it, but it’s a lot easier to talk that way of someone who’s disconnected with the people I think might read this. But I might be surprised, that’s the power of the internet.

Psalm 9:11b: ...declare among the people his doings

Dear dudes, folks, and other dignitaries,

Here’s some stuff I wrote one night when I was in the throes of feeling bad about going to SMBI.

“You know God, I just don’t know. I just don’t know. All I know is that I felt pretty confident that you were in this leading me to go to Bible School and China back then. I remember exclaiming to Merry how that you just worked it out so nicely that I could study Chinese culture, since I was going to be going over there. What is that? What is this? I don’t understand. It’s not life or death I know. But what makes sense? This doesn’t. I know that we have to do some things sometimes that don’t make sense, but I don’t even know if this is what I’m supposed to do. That’s the problem.

“But what can I do? Since I was thinking you were speaking back then, and I don’t hear you speaking clearly to change that, what can I do? …

“Unless. Unless you make it clear to me that you don’t want me to go to Bible School at all. Or maybe that you want me to go to China too. If that’s the case it’s all messed up.

“So God, I just ask you, I just plead with you, show me what you want. Show ME WHAT YOU WANT! Please. The thought of anger has crossed my mind. I hate all these constraints. The constraint of wanting to please everybody, being afraid of what they’ll think if I change my mind. The constraint of decisions in the pass (sic) setting the course for my future. I’m so not at peace about this. People say that in times like these eventually they’ll be struck by a sense of peace about the whole thing. I so don’t have that…

Wow, those were tough days, but it's like the mountains that I was being forced to run up have been replaced by a flat road that I only have to walk down.

Still decisions and twist--always--but I know it'll be interesting. Even if I messed up on that stupid test!

Let's do this.

I took two tests this week, one on Monday (Facilities) and one today (Production Planning and Control).

I'll predict what I'll get on them, and then when I get the results back we'll compare and see how close I was.

In Facilities, the test went well. There were no surprises (except perhaps some of the multiple choice) and I think I probably got out of it with not major mess-ups, though I could have lost a point here and there. But then there was the multiple choice, in which there is always a chance that a person'll miss 1 or 2 or 3. Best-case scenario: 98. Worst-case scenario: 85. My prediction: 94.

In Production Planning and Control, however, we had a few problems. I know I missed one of the m/c, and also messed up on one of the parts of one of the quantitative questions. The big question is, how much will this one conceptual mistake hurt me? It not only affects the part of the question I made a mistake on, but it also possibly affects the next part. Best-case scenario: 94. Worst-case scenario: 80. My prediction: 87.

This is a book folks.

I think people think of me sometimes as a guy who pretty much has it all together. If you are of that opinion, you are sadly mistaken.

In September of 2002 (or was it August) AHQ does this tour thing where we went as far back east as Ohio. I have a terrible chronological memory, so the details might be a little inaccurate. But we went to a Sharon Mennonite Bible Institute Choir Tour reunion, which involved David. I was very impressed and it got me to thinking that I’d like to go to SMBI. I’m also interested (sorry about the change in verb tense) at that point in going to China for a month with Global Tribes Outreach. Sure, it would do weird things to my school plans, but hey, we could work around them.

Fast forward a week or two, and I’m riding high because my advisor at school didn’t seem to mind this idea too much (she just scheduled school around it, even though it would now take longer) and my parents are fairly encouraging.

Fast forward another 6 or 7 months. I’m now at OSU and all of the sudden this idea’s not looking quite so rosy, considering the stretching out of my undergraduate career and possibly missing some school-related opportunities. But I stick with it, because I’m still convinced that God was leading in that way.

I struggle on and off with it throughout the Spring, Summer, and into this Fall, especially when I find out that I can’t go to SMBI for two terms like I had been planning. I never really consider chucking the whole idea because I still think that I’ve set my course, God worked it out, and I need to go. Somewhere in there, I decided to drop the China thing because that would involve missing two terms of school and I decided I only wanted to miss one.

But I continue to struggle, and it’s getting bad. So bad that it’s even affecting my focus and motivation in my current classes. It was advising week so I went in to see my new advisor and he was sort of blunt. “It’ll mess you up,” he said, of missing this key winter term.

It’s about then that I started considering not going to SMBI at all. See, from the outside looking in this may not seem to be such a big deal, and in the overall scheme of things it isn’t, but we’re dealing with more than just the bare facts here, at least from my perspective. I didn’t want to have to tell people that I was changing plans, because, hey, I’m Byran and I’m the guy that appears sure of myself and my future and it would be embarrassing to tell everyone that plans are changing so momentously, to do such an abrupt about-face. Pride, folks.

But then I had to ask myself, “Why am I going to SMBI?” and when I looked at the reasons for and against, it was hardly a question.

Reasons to go:

1. I thought that’s what God wanted me to do back when I made my initial decision.
2. People (my cousin Heidi in particular) were expecting me to go.
3. I had just told people that I was going, I’d have to eat my words.

Not a particularly strong bunch of reasons, especially when stacked against the reasons to stay.

1. I felt really not good about going, I would feel a lot better if I stayed.
2. The whole flow of life thing. SMBI seemed like unnatural break that would set me back school-wise. If I’m going to school, let’s go to school, you know?
3. Relationships at school. It’s my desire to witness to people by learning to know them and involving myself in their lives, and if I left in the winter it would totally mess that up.

You know what, though, it almost makes me a little cynical about this hearing-from-God thing, though, because during those times of uncertainty and feeling very unsure of my charted course (SMBI and before that China), I had (manufactured?) reasons why it was God’s will and how even then He was leading and affirming my path. Like back in the Spring when I was in an Anthropology class and I got help with a project on a small Chinese village or when I thought about the fact that at SMBI I’d be taking a couple of evangelism classes (urban and Moslem) which was really down my line.

I was walking on air this afternoon after I registered for Winter Term.

When I was in 7th Grade I played on the Harrisburg Junior High basketball team. I was little--not very physically mature at all--and this was the time of life that many of the other 7th and 8th graders were much bigger, stronger, and faster than me. The way they had it set up was that the first few practices were tryouts and the top players were put on the 'A' team while the rest played on the 'B' team.

Like I said, I was little, and evidently not particularly effective amongst the bigger players, so I played mostly on the 'B' team, though I dressed for the 'A' team. Harrisburg is a 2A school, and the king of our junior high league was Junction City, a 3A school. Our coaches had dreams of beating them, of course, and I remember one game against them in particular.

I was completely intimidated by one of the 8th-graders, and pretty scared of playing in the 'A' game. In this game against Junction City, we quickly fell behind. All of the sudden, the assistant coach points at me and motions for me to go to the scorer's table.

He said, "If we're going to beat these guys, we're going to do it with quickness and speed."

He erroneously thought that since I was small, I must be quick and fast. I wasn't either, really, and besides that I was scared stiff. I got in there, and we ran our offense, which included a pass to me. I quickly passed back to the point guard and that was that. I was completely ineffective.

Why? I had ability, though I wasn't as big and fast as most of the other players. But that's happened before, where the little guy can be effective despite his size. What was wrong with me?

I was scared, man. Totally freaked out. I didn't want to make a mistake, I felt in way over my head, I just wanted to get in, not make a fool of myself, and get out. I really would rather have not played. This is an awful mindset, certainly not one that will render a person effective.

If there's a point to this, it's that you've got to get your head and heart right before you can do much of value.

There’s nice weather at the Oregon coast sometimes. Sunny, nice breeze, on the verge of being warm. I don’t know that I’ve ever been out at the coast when it’s been that way. Then there’s average weather at the coast. It may or may not be sunny, but there is a stiff wind that may or may not have a bite to it. You can do fun stuff like sandcastles and wading (if you dare), but it’s not like the beach of your dreams. Then there’s stormy weather at the Oregon coast. Like nice weather, I hadn’t ever really experienced it—until this weekend.

We’d been cooped up in the house for all of Friday evening and Saturday morning, so Rosie decided to lead a crusade to walk the stormy beach. She succeeded in getting all of us out there except Emily who is recovering from a broken leg. It was nasty: gailing winds, with sharp, biting rain. Matt said it was the second-worst experience of his life. It was sort of fun, though not altogether comfortable. It was so violent. Wind like that is so fierce and unrelenting. One thing I learned is that seagulls need a little running start to get up in the air. They’re like little airplanes that need a short runway.

The funny thing was, after we got done cruising Newport, we went out on the beach again—this time in the dark. And it was great. A gentle breeze, mild temperature, and not rain at all. We walked and talked a long time. And Rosie lent me good perspective on things.