March 29-April 3, 1997. A montage of the new quarter. (#126)

March 13, 2022March 14, 2022 ~ Greg Dennison ~ 21 Comments

“Now remember, Boz,” I said. “When Brian finds out that you’re a Star Wars fan, he’s gonna test you and ask if you know the number of the trash compactor that Luke and the others almost got smashed in.”

“I don’t remember,” Boz replied.

“It’s ‘3263827,’” I said.

“‘3263827.’ I’ll remember that.”

I had just spent four days at my parents’ house for Spring Break, returning to Jeromeville on the Saturday morning before classes started. Mom, my brother Mark, and his two best friends Boz and Cody followed me up for the day in a separate car. Mom had gotten the idea that it might be fun for the boys to come visit, and with all three of them in high school now, it was never too early to start visiting universities. We had met at McDonald’s for lunch, and now we were on our way back to my apartment.

“Hey,” Brian said when the five of us walked inside.

“This is my brother Mark, and his friends Cody and Boz,” I said to Brian. “And you’ve met my mother before.”

“Boz?” Brian asked.

“Short for Matthew Bosworth,” I explained.

“Yeah,” Boz said. “You can call me Boz. Or Matt. Either one.”

“Boz is as big of a Star Wars fan as you,” I said.

“I have a question I always ask Star Wars fans,” Brian explained, “to see if you’re a true fan. What is the number of the trash compactor on the Death Star where they were stuck?”

“3263827.”

“Very good.”

“I have to admit, though, Greg prepared me, because he told me you would ask that.”

“Ah,” Brian replied. “Do you have any obscure Star Wars trivia you ask people like that?”

“Sure. Who is the director of photography?”

“I don’t know that one.”

“Gilbert Taylor.”

“Nice! I don’t have all the obscure credits memorized.”

“I would just leave the credits on and watch the names sometimes.”

“That’s cool how each of us pays attention to different details,” Brian said.

The rest of the day went well. I showed the boys around campus. They came back to the apartment and played basketball in the common area. I like to think that something from that day really made an impression, because Cody and Boz would both end up attending the University of Jeromeville after they finished high school. My brother did not; he went to community college for a few years and then transferred to the State University of Bay City.

Sunday was Easter, my first since I began attending Jeromeville Covenant Church. Church was more crowded than usual, but it was not as dramatic of a difference as Catholic Easter masses back home at Our Lady of Peace were compared to ordinary Sundays.

My first class Monday morning was not even on the University of Jeromeville campus. I rode my bike along my usual route as far as the intersection of Andrews Road and 15th Street, then turned left on 15th and parked at the bike rack of Jeromeville High School. I walked through the entrance to campus and found Mr. O’Rourke’s class toward the back of the school. Mr. O’Rourke had told me to just sit at the table in the back, and I could help students work on problems later in the period.

Mr. O’Rourke was an older man with short gray hair and a no-nonsense personality. After the students had arrived, he gestured toward me. “This is Greg Dennison,” he said. “He’s a student at UJ, and he’s going to help out in our class for the rest of the year.” Some of the students turned around to look at me, intrigued; I waved at them.

As Mr. O’Rourke lectured, I looked around at what I could see of the class. The class seemed very large to me; I counted forty-one students. I was used to high school classes of around 30 students at most. I would learn later that Mr. O’Rourke was semi-retired, only teaching the one class, and he was such a popular teacher that students would sometimes ask to be in his class even when it appeared full.

After Mr. O’Rourke finished explaining and demonstrating relationships between sine and cosine functions, I walked up to his desk. “So, just walk around and help students now?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Mr. O’Rourke said. “That would be good.”

My first few times up and down the rows in the classroom, no one asked me anything. This was a precalculus class, so these were mostly honor students; maybe none of them needed help. Eventually, though, I saw one student who was leaving most of the work blank on his paper. “Do you need help?” I asked. “Do you understand what to do?

“I don’t get it,” the student said.

“What do you know about sine and cosine? Can I see your notes for today?” I pointed out what he had sloppily written in his notebook and showed him what he could use to solve the problem in front of him. I could not tell how well he understood.

“Is there anything else I have to do?” I asked Mr. O’Rourke when the bell rang.

“No, not really,” he said. “At the end of the week, we’ll talk about how it’s going so far.”

“Sounds good. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

As I walked toward the school entrance, past a row of lockers, I heard a female voice say, “Greg!” I instinctively turned and looked, although as I did so I realized that I did not know anyone at Jeromeville High School. This girl was probably talking to some other guy named Greg. Maybe it was a student from Mr. O’Rourke’s class whom I just met this morning, but why would she need to talk to me now, outside of math class? I saw a familiar face reaching into a locker as I turned around, and I realized that I did know someone at Jeromeville High School: Erica Foster from church.

“Hey,” I said. “What’s up?”

“What are you doing here?” Erica asked.

“I’m doing a Math 197 tutoring class,” I said. “I’m TAing in Mr. O’Rourke’s first period.”

“That’s awesome! Everyone says Mr. O’Rourke is a great teacher. I never got to be in his class, though.”

“He seems like the kind of teacher I would have liked.”

“So you want to be a teacher? Is that why you’re doing this?”

“I’m still trying to figure that out,” I said. “I’m looking at different options for the future. One of my professors asked me if I had ever thought about being a teacher, and he set this up for me.”

“That’s cool.”

“What are you doing next year? You graduate this year, right?”

“Yeah! I’m going on a mission trip to Turkey for part of the summer, and then I’m still waiting to hear back from some schools, but I’m probably going to stay home and go to UJ.”

“That’s cool,” I said.

“I need to get to class, but it was good running into you.”

“Yeah. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

A few hours later, back on campus, I had Data Structures, a computer science class. A lower-division computer science class, Introduction to Programming, was a requirement for the mathematics major. In addition to the upper-division mathematics units required for my major, a small number of courses in statistics and computer science, including this Data Structures class, counted in place of upper division math units. As a kid, writing code in BASIC on a Commodore 64, I enjoyed computer programming as a hobby. I chose against majoring in computer science, though, because my computer knowledge was out of date, and I did not want a hobby to turn into work. But I wanted to take this class, so I could learn more about programming while working toward my mathematics degree.

Technology-related majors were very popular at Jeromeville, especially in 1997 with the Internet just emerging as a consumer technology. Because of this, computer science and computer engineering majors had priority to register first for most computer science classes. This was my third attempt at taking Data Structures. The first time, I was number 19 on the waiting list, and the professor said that no new spots would open up. The second time, I had moved up to first on the waiting list by the first day of classes. I was hopeful, but the professor said that they had already expanded the number of spaces in class beyond what they should have. The number of computers in the labs was too small to support this many students, so no new spots would open up. For the other computer science classes I had taken, I did most of my work at home, dialed up to the campus Internet late at night so as not to tie up the phone line. I suspected that lab space was not as much of an issue now that working from home was possible. But the department had not changed their rules.

This quarter, the professor gave the usual bit about the class already being too full, and no one else being admitted from the waiting list. But this time, it did not matter, because I already had a spot in the class. When I called in to register last month, I expected to get put on the waiting list, but it said I had successfully registered. This might have been my only chance to take the class, so I took it. I told this to Eddie from Jeromeville Christian Fellowship at the retreat last week, and he said this was God opening up a door for me. Definitely.

After Data Structures, I had chorus. As I walked toward the bass section, Danielle Coronado, who lived down the hall from me freshman year, came up to me and gave me a hug. “Greg!” she said. “You’re back!”

“Yeah. I wanted to do chorus last quarter, but it was the same time as Dr. Hurt’s Writings of John class.”

“That’s right. Well, I’m glad you’re back.”

“Thank you.”

I walked toward the bass section and sat next to a guy I recognized from fall quarter when I was also in chorus. “Hey,” he said. “Welcome back. It’s Greg, right?”

“Yeah,” I replied. I did not know this guy, I thought he was a music major, and I did not know the music majors very well. I was surprised that he recognized me.

About fifteen minutes into class, after explaining some procedural matters, Dr. Jeffs, the conductor, said, “The pieces this quarter are Schubert’s Mass No. 2 and Brahms’ Neue Liebeslieder. The sheet music is at the bookstore; hopefully you all have that by now. We’ll start on the Schubert today.” As he began playing and demonstrating part of Schubert’s Mass, Dr. Jeffs explained that Schubert was from Vienna, so we would be using Viennese Latin pronunciations instead of Italian Latin. When performing Schubert, the word “qui,” for example, was pronounced “kvee” instead of “kwee.” I had never heard of such a thing. The Brahms piece was also entirely in German, a language I did not know how to pronounce. I was sure I would get used to it.

The spring of 1997 was an unusual quarter for me; it was the only quarter that I did not have any actual mathematics classes. Helping in Mr. O’Rourke’s class at Jeromeville High would go on my transcript as a two-unit math class, but I did not sit in a lecture or do homework out of a textbook. Data Structures counted as a major requirement, but was not technically a math class.

This quarter was also my lightest load by number of units; I only took as many units as were required to maintain my status as a full time student. But it certainly did not feel like a light load, because the two actual classes I was taking, besides Mr. O’Rourke’s class and chorus, were both extremely difficult and time-consuming. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I had Philosophy and Social Foundations of Education. I had not made a final decision about my future, but I was now seriously considering the option of becoming a teacher, so I figured it would not hurt to start working on prerequisites for the teacher training program.

I could tell after ten minutes of class on the first Tuesday that this class would be a lot of work. As a math major, I was not used to classes with this much reading and writing. But the subject matter looked interesting, investigating some of the difficult questions about why education is important in society, and why schooling is done as it is. As a possible future teacher, it was important to answer these questions, and I had to take this class at some point if I were to become a teacher. Good thing I took it in a quarter when I had a light schedule.

Wednesday evening I had The Edge, the junior high school youth group at church, for which I was a volunteer. The staff and volunteers arrived an hour before the students, and the meeting before the kids arrived felt a little different because Taylor Santiago was not there. Taylor had been my friend since Day 1 of freshman year, and he had encouraged me to get involved with youth ministry after he noticed some boys from the youth group take a liking to me after church. He left last week for six months of inner-city ministry in Chicago; he would be back for the start of the school year in the fall.

As the students walked in, we usually had music playing, typically some Christian artist. Having only been a practicing Christian for a little over a year, I was just scratching the surface of the vast world of Christian contemporary music. Whatever this music was that played today, I found it intriguing. It sounded like rock with horns. I only knew of one other band that sounded remotely like this, although that other band was not Christian music; this was definitely not them. At the Spring Picnic freshman year, I had been told to go watch a local band called Lawsuit that played there every year. Lawsuit was a unique blend of rock with horns that some people described as “ska,” the first time I had ever heard that word. I went on to see Lawsuit play three more times in the two years since.

I was checking in students at the entrance that day, along with Erica Foster, the girl I saw at Jeromeville High after Mr. O’Rourke’s class. Her younger brother was one of the teen boys who had taken a liking to me. “What is this music?” I asked Erica.

“Five Iron Frenzy,” she said. “My brother has been listening to this a lot at home.”

“I don’t know them,” I said. “I just got excited that there’s a Chrsitian band that sounds like Lawsuit.”

“Is this what Lawsuit sounds like?” Erica asked. “I’ve heard of them but I don’t know anything about them.”

“Sounded like,” I corrected. “They broke up.”

“Really? I didn’t know that.”

“Yeah. This last New Year’s Eve was their last show.”

“That’s too bad. I heard they were good.”

“They were! They sounded like nothing I’d ever heard. But now I’m gonna have to check out this Five Iron Frenzy.”

Jeromeville had a small Christian bookstore, and I went there as soon as I was done with classes the next day to find that the Five Iron Frenzy album, called Upbeats and Beatdowns, was in stock. I brought it home and listened to it while I replied to a few emails in my inbox. In November, I was saddened to receive a flyer from Lawsuit announcing their breakup. I did not attend their final show, on December 31; I was halfway across the country at the Urbana conference on that day, and the show was for ages 21 and up, which I would not be until next August. But now I was excited to discover a Christian band that sounded like Lawsuit.

I learned a few songs into the album that I had been mistaken; Five Iron Frenzy did not sound particularly like Lawsuit, beyond being rock with horns. They had a much faster and more aggressive sound, more like punk rock with horns, a genre called ska-punk that was emerging at the time. But it was catchy, and I could hear references to Christianity in the lyrics, at least when I could understand lead vocalist Reese Roper’s high-pitched, fast singing.

A few minutes later, a song called “Anthem” came on, and I immediately began to regret my decision to buy this album. Reese called America a hollow country, and sang about how he did not care about the American notion of freedom. If the members of Five Iron Frenzy were Christians, why were they spewing this anti-American liberal crap? As far as I knew, Christians were conservatives who loved their country. Maybe this was not entirely true, I realized, as Reese sang about true freedom being from Jesus Christ. But I still loved my country and did not find patriotism inherently at odds with Christianity. Two other songs on the album besides “Anthem” directly criticized the sins of the United States and the shallow nature of the American church, but if I must be honest, these criticisms were certainly justified.

I liked most of the rest of the album. In addition to songs praising God, the album also contained some songs that were just silly, like one about the old TV show Diff’rent Strokes and one about how Jesus is better than superheroes. Other songs explored deep philosophical topics of interest to Christians living in this world, like one about colorful characters waiting for a bus.

The album did eventually grow on me, although to this day I still always skip “Anthem.” I have had a complicated relationship with Five Iron Frenzy over the years, one that has featured some very personal experiences. I sang one line on Reese Roper’s solo album in 2004, and I had an hour-long personal conversation with saxophonist Leanor Ortega-Till in 2020. And in addition to recording some of my favorite songs ever, Five Iron Frenzy has also recorded many other songs in the same vein as Anthem that I did not particularly care for.

Currently, I have mixed feelings about Five Iron Frenzy. They released an album in 2021 of all angry political music, with none of the Christian or silly songs. Ultimately, though, I have always said that Five Iron Frenzy did a great job of bringing together Christian and secular fans, liberals and conservatives, just by being real. I understand now that Christianity is not by any means limited to Americans or conservatives, and it should not be. Paul writes to the Corinthians that different people have different gifts that are all part of the body of Christ. Just as Boz and Brian had discovered their different takes on Star Wars trivia when they met a few days ago, people with different cultural and political backgrounds have different experiences with Christianity. I may not agree politically with all Christians, but we are still one in Christ, each with a role in the global Church.

Hello, readers! What’s an obscure fact about your favorite movie that you like to remember and tell people about?

If you like what you read, don’t forget to like this post and follow this blog. Also follow Don’t Let The Days Go By on Facebook and Instagram.

Also, the Five Iron Frenzy music video below comes from an unofficial source on YouTube. Just in case it gets taken down, I’ll include an official audio as well.

June 25-27, 1996. The first week of summer session. (#89)

May 2, 2021December 19, 2021 ~ Greg Dennison ~ 13 Comments

The architecture and landscaping around the University of Jeromeville are not the old brick buildings and towering, stately trees commonly associated with universities. The towering trees are there, in the older parts of campus, but the buildings are a mix of architectural styles. The traditional brick Wellington Hall, the wooden shingles of Old North and South Halls, the Spanish stucco and tile of Harper Hall, and the bizarre angled concrete of the Death Star Building are all visible just from the Quad. Some criticize the campus for its lack of architectural unity, but I always found that this gave it character.

One of the sections of campus with the least glamorous architecture was far to the southwest of the Quad, just past the engineering buildings, east of the South Residential Area. Two prefabricated buildings, resembling the portable classrooms on most elementary and secondary school campi in this state but larger, stood surrounded by several feet of bare dirt on each side, and more interesting buildings in view nearby. One of these buildings was divided in half, with a sign calling it “Temporary Classrooms 1 & 2,” and the other had only one door, labeled “Temporary Classroom 3.”

I parked my bike and walked into Temporary Classroom 3. A chalkboard ran along the side of the building to the left, and about eighty chairs with the little writing desks that fold out faced the chalkboard. The room was about half full so far, and most of the empty seats filled up by the time the instructor arrived at noon. I assumed that this man was the instructor, at least, because he carried a binder and stack of papers to the front of the room. He was slender, with wavy light brown hair, wearing a dress shirt and slacks, and he appeared fairly young, probably in his early thirties. A darker-haired man of about that age, dressed more casually, had been sitting in the front of the room the whole time. The instructor handed the other man a stack of papers, which they began passing out to the class.

“Welcome to Computer Science 40, Introduction to Software,” the instructor said. “My name is Tom Kroger. This,” he said, gesturing to the darker-haired man passing out papers, “is Joe White. He will be the TA for this class, and he will lead the discussion section on Wednesday mornings.” The syllabus was among the papers Joe White passed out, and neither of their names had the title “Dr.” in front. I assumed that Joe White, like most teaching assistants, was a graduate student studying computer science, and I wondered, because of his youth and lack of title, if Tom Kroger was a graduate student as well. In my department, mathematics, graduate students sometimes taught first-year classes as the actual instructor, not just the teaching assistant; perhaps computer science did the same thing, particularly during the summer session. (I would learn later that I was correct.)

Tom spent the first part of class explaining our assignments, the grading policy, office hours, computer lab hours, and other procedural items. We would be using the programming language C, and the textbook for the class was called C How To Program, the only textbook I ever had with a pun for a title. An optional supplementary book taught the basics of Unix operating systems; I bought this book too, since I had little familiarity with Unix. For the rest of the 110-minute class, Tom lectured about high-level structured programming languages and the C standard library. While some elements are common to most programming languages, C seemed fundamentally different than the Commodore 64 BASIC programming that I taught myself at age nine, or the Pascal language that I learned last quarter in my Introduction to Programming class.

Summer session classes teach ten weeks of material in six weeks, so the class met more often during the week than classes do during the regular school year. The class met from 12:10 to 2:00 every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday afternoon, with a discussion section Wednesday morning from 10:00 to 11:50, right before the lecture. We would have weekly projects that would be discussed at that time. This was the only class I was taking this summer, and I had no job, so I had plenty of time to study and get work done.

After class, I went to the Memorial Union and got a slice of pepperoni pizza. I had not packed a lunch, I just figured that I would eat when I got home, but being back on campus for the first time in almost two weeks made me want to sit back and take in the atmosphere. I took my lunch to a table in the courtyard by the fountain that was now kept perpetually dry. I read the Daily Colt campus newspaper as I ate. The name was a bit misleading, since during the summer, the newspaper only published twice a week, in a smaller tabloid format only about half as long as the regular edition.

The campus was much quieter today than I was used to, since the majority of the student population was not in class for the summer. Those fun times last year of running into friends around campus between classes, and all the interesting conversations that happened around those encounters, probably would not happen as often this summer. The last time I sat at this table was when Haley Channing was sitting here, and I asked if I could join her. For a girl-crazy, socially awkward guy like me, getting to have lunch with Haley was like winning the lottery. Of course, I embarrassed myself in front of her a few minutes later; Claire Seaver from church choir walked by, and I tried to introduce Haley and Claire, not realizing that they already knew each other. I would have no random encounters with Haley this summer, since she was home working a summer job, 400 miles away.

The Daily Colt still included a crossword puzzle, which I did after I was done eating. Even though the campus was emptier than usual, I was not completely alone. I still had choir practice at church on Wednesdays, and I was in a Bible study that started this Thursday, so I would see some of my friends then.

The discussion Wednesday morning was also in Temp 3. It was required, and the class was not split into multiple small discussion groups, so all of the students were there. Joe White introduced our first project. It seemed fairly straightforward, a project designed mostly just to acquaint students with the system and the basics of coding in C.

At two o’clock, after the lecture with Tom Kroger, I went to the computer lab in the basement of Kent Hall. It was spread out across five rooms, and being an afternoon in summer when only a few computer science classes were offered, all of them were mostly empty. When I had come here during Intro to Programming last quarter, there were usually many more people down here. These computers ran X Window, a graphical interface for Unix-based computers that bore a superficial resemblance to the Microsoft Windows 3.1 that I was familiar with. I opened a text editor in a new window, where I typed my code as a text file, which I would later compile into an executable.

I stayed in the lab for about an hour working on my project, and by that time I felt comfortable with how this system worked, as well as with C in general. I still had a lot of work to do on the project, but I had a week to do it. I was in no hurry; I just wanted to make sure I was familiar with the computer system before it was too late.

Since many UJ students leave to spend the summer at home or get summer jobs or internships elsewhere, the Newman Center only offers two Sunday Masses during the summer instead of three. I would learn later that many other churches in Jeromeville also decrease the number of services during the summer, for the same reason.

When I got to choir practice on Wednesday night, some familiar faces were missing, and others had taken their places. I knew that the Coronado sisters had both gone home to Desert Ridge for the summer, and a few others, including Phil Gallo and Melanie Giordano, were absent as well. I recognized a few people from events that the church had held, and I assumed that these new people were singers from the early morning Mass, who were combined with us now.

“Greg!” Claire said when I walked in. “You’re here! Are you gonna be here all summer?”

“Mostly,” I replied. “I wasn’t here last week because I went home to see my family. But I’m back for the summer. At least most of it.”

“How was that?”

“It went well. My brother and I made a silly board game out of all of our inside jokes.”

“That sounds fun!”

“It was!”

I walked over to the music stand with my copy of this week’s music. A girl I did not know stood next to me. She was short, with short chin-length brown hair and brown eyes. “Hi,” I said. “I don’t think I know you.”

“I’m Ellen.”

“I’m Greg,” I replied. “Nice to meet you.”

“You too.”

“Are you from the early service?” I asked, assuming that the answer would be yes.

“No,” Ellen said. “My family goes to Mass here. I’m going to school in San Diego, and I’m home for the summer.”

“Oh, I see,” I said.

“Do you know Kevin Stark? He’s my dad.”

“I think I know who he is. He’s a professor of pomology, or something like that?”

“Yes! It’s funny, that’s what everyone seems to remember about him.”

“I remember him talking about his research once.”

“Yeah, Dad always tells people he studies fruits and nuts. Then he adds, ‘The kind that grow on trees.’”

“That’s funny,” I said, laughing.

“Yeah, but it’s less great when you hear him say it all the time. Dumb jokes get old.”

“True. That makes sense. So what’s your major?”

“Marine biology. You?”

“Math.”

“Wow. That was never my favorite class.”

“I get that reaction a lot,” I said.

At this point, I realized that the rest of the room had become quiet and was staring at us. “I was just saying, it’s time to get started,” Claire explained. We mostly did familiar songs that week, so we got through choir practice relatively quickly. Ellen had a nice voice. I was looking forward to singing on Sunday. While I still held out hope that something would work out with Haley eventually, I could not help but wonder if Ellen had a boyfriend.

Thursday felt like a Friday to me, since I knew that it was my last class for the week. With only one class this summer, I was going to have a four-day weekend every week. I liked this schedule. After class was over, I rode my bike into downtown Jeromeville and went to Tower Records. After browsing the entire store, I bought the new Dave Matthews Band CD, Crash. I listened to it as soon as I got home.

That night, after dinner, I drove to Pine Grove Apartments, about a mile to the south. Jeromeville Christian Fellowship did not have their large group meetings on Fridays during the summer, but there were two Bible studies meeting this summer, one here near campus and one on the other side of Jeromeville. I found the apartment I was looking for and knocked on the door. “Come in,” someone said from inside.

“Greg!” Lillian greeted as I opened the door. Lillian was a year older than me, and she had co-led my Bible study during the school year. Her co-leader this summer with a guy her year named Chris.

“Hey, Greg,” Chris said. “What’s up?”

“Not much. Just taking a class and hanging out.”

“Which class?” Lillian asked.

“CS 40. Intro to Software.”

“I’ve heard that’s really hard,” Chris said. “My roommate is a CS major. And you’re taking it in the summer, packed into six weeks? Good luck.”

“I like it so far,” I said.

“Do you need computer science for the math major?” Lillian asked.

“CS 30 is required; I took that last quarter. 110 is optional, it counts in place of math units, and 40 is a prerequisite for 110, so I figured I would take 40 in the summer, when it’s easier to get into. And programming is something I was always interested in.”

About five minutes after I arrived, we started with worship music as Chris played guitar and we all sang. When it came time to begin the study, Lillian explained that we would be studying the First Epistle of John this summer. I knew most of the people in this Bible study, after having spent most of the last school year going to JCF. Tabitha Sasaki read the first half of the chapter out loud, and Jason Costello read the second half. A verse that Tabitha read stuck out in my mind: “We proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us.”

We spent the next forty minutes or so discussing what John meant in writing these verses. I kept thinking about that verse about proclaiming eternal life, which I was not good at. I preferred to mind my own business when it came to telling people about my faith, this came more naturally to me, but I often worried that this was not enough. I had friends who were good at inviting their friends to JCF; some people, including myself, had come to faith by being invited to JCF. I had friends who were proclaiming eternal life this summer in Morocco, India, and other nations where Chrsitianity was not a dominant part of the culture.

The parent organization of JCF, Intervarsity, put on a convention every three years in Urbana, Illinois, for young adults to learn about mission trips and service opportunities. Many of my friends were going, and I was considering going as well, although the thought of spending a few hundred dollars to register for this, and a few hundred more to fly to Illinois, was overwhelming. An early bird price offered a significant discount to anyone who signed up before the end of June, which was only a few days away.

After we finished studying the chapter from 1 John, Chris asked, “Are there any prayer requests?” A few of the others shared concerns about sick relatives and overwhelming school workloads.

I spoke up after a few minutes. “I still haven’t decided whether or not I’m going to Urbana,” I said, “and I want to decide before the price goes up. That’s in a few days.”

“I think it’ll be a really good experience for you,” Lillian said, “but I know, it’s a lot of money if you’re not really committed. We’ll pray for you.”

After everyone shared their prayer requests, we all went in a circle, praying for the person next to us. “God,” Tabitha said, “I pray for Greg. I pray that you will give him wisdom to know whether or not Urbana is right for him. I pray that Greg will know your will, and that you will speak to him all the great things you plan on doing through him. I pray that he will find a way to make the finances work out, if this is your will.”

“Lord, I pray for Jason,” I said after Tabitha was done. “I pray for his busy schedule, that you will help him stay focused on classes. I pray that he will manage his time well, and find a balance between spending time in the Word and spending time on studies.”

After we finished prayer requests, and the study ended, Tabitha asked, “What are you up to tonight?”

“Just going to work on my project for class,” I said. “I’m going to see if I can figure out how to connect to the CS computer lab from my computer at home, so I don’t have to go into the lab.”

“Let me know as soon as you’ve decided on Urbana. I still want to get a few people to go in together on a flight. I told you about that, right?”

“Yeah. I will let you know.”

“Perfect!”

After I got home, I turned on the computer, listened to the beeps and whirs of the dialup modem connecting, and connected to the computers in the basement of Kent Hall. I opened a second window and connected to my usual IRC chat channel, so I could find people to send messages to while I was working. I put on the new Dave Matthews Band CD for the second time that day.

By the end of the night, I had decided that I preferred this setup over physically going to the basement of Kent Hall. Writing code from home gave me the opportunity to listen to music and have a chat room open at the same time. For certain types of studying, like those involving large amounts of reading, I do not do well while listening to music, but I enjoyed listening to music during other types of studying, like math homework or computer science projects.

The obvious drawback of doing computer science work from home, of course, is that I could not use the telephone while I was connected to the Internet. Anyone who tried calling me would get a busy signal. Although I did not get many calls, I did not want to tie up the phone line; I always held out hope that maybe I would get a phone call from a cute girl, or that someone would invite me to something awesome. But since I did not have to get up early most days, I could wait until after ten o’clock, when I was unlikely to get phone calls, and work on coding late into the night. I managed to train myself to sleep in until around ten in the morning, since my class did not begin until noon, although I had to make sure to get to bed earlier on Tuesdays so I could get up in time for the Wednesday morning discussion. Once my body got used to staying up late and waking up late, that schedule worked very well for me. I did not set foot in the basement of Kent Hall again for the rest of the summer.

When I finally went to bed that first night, at 1:46 AM, I closed my eyes and prayed again that God would show me the right decision about going to Urbana. By that time, though, I felt like I already knew the answer. I had found Jesus, and I needed to know what the next step in my faith journey would be. I also had many friends who were traveling overseas to spread the Gospel, and I did not know how to support them, or even the nature of their work in the first place, in some cases. I mailed my registration form the following morning. I now had six months to work out the details, but I already had a head start since Tabitha was putting a flight together. It was a wonderful first week of class, and as I drifted off to sleep, I felt optimistic for the rest of the summer.