Untitled...

I'm generally an early to bed type of guy. But I'm rarely this tired at 9:30 p.m. I'm not sure why. I woke up late today (around 9:00 a.m.) and worked a normal shift. Anyway...

An admissions counselor from East Texas Baptist University, my alma mater, called today and invited me out to lunch. His name is Blake and he was in town visiting prospective students and alumni who help out here and there with recruiting. It was great visiting with him. We have several common friends and it was good sharing stories. It was also good talking to someone who knows the places I know. But mostly it was good remembering from where I've come.

Hard to believe it was nine years ago that I entered ETBU. Initially I did not want to go. I had visited the campus as a high school student for a couple of camps but didn't have a desire to attend. I knew people who went there. They were weird. I didn't want to be weird. But my best friend from high school started to get interested in it and so I started to get interested in it.

At this point in the blog I could go in about 17 different directions about ETBU life..... Driving home every weekend the first year, being secluded, experiencing thinking for the first time, being close in proximity to my grandmother, yada, yada, and yada.

All those yada's and blah, blah, blah's add up to a huge chunk of who I am. A huge chunk that I decided a couple of years ago not to run away from like many ex-ETBU'ers do. I could have gone to Baylor and perhaps had a more stringent theological education. I could have gone to UT and been exposed to more healthy ideas about culture and society or I could have gone to A&M and been a part of something bigger than anything in all the world.

But I chose ETBU and as a result I have memories of sitting in a circle of people praying to the God we gave our lives to, of Beth spending evenings by herself working math problems-- for fun, of teasing Brent about sleeping with Dr. Cone because he was the king of the biology department and she was the single middle aged professor of the biology department, of that cold Sunday morning during the holidays when I was the only student in town and walking from my car in the parking lot of that little country church and hearing the sounds coming from inside that by any standards other than the standards of The Kingdom would have been out of tune and horrible but through which God appeared to me in one of the greatest convergences of earth and heaven I've ever known, of friends named Jason and Jason and Robert and Blake and Susan and Casey and Mark and others who for a year made each other the center of each other's world and taught me about the rhythyms of being together, and of looking back in wonder, and of a lunch on one of the most random of days with a new friend bound by God and circumstance.

I guess we choose what we choose.