Seize the Day: My Small Miracle.

Hello, dear friends!

On Monday, the snow from the back of the dorms was mostly gone, so I decided to see if I could find my prodigal camera. I walked around a bit, but it only took about 5 minutes to locate the poor thing, incongruently sitting there on the wet grass. I tried to turn it on, just to see if it would, but I wasn't expecting anything. It had been out in the weather and melting snow for 6 days. Amazingly enough, it turned on, but wouldn't take pictures. I ran it upstairs to my room, took the batteries and SD card out, put them all in a bowl of rice, and hoped for the best. This is my resulting happy dance:

It is so amazing to me how God cares about the smallest details of our lives...things like this camera continuing to function after being subjected to an electronic abuse that it should not have recovered from. I had resigned myself to being without a camera for the rest of the term, and it wasn't a horrible fate, but God chose to bless me by resurrecting it! Hahaha, that sounds really ridiculous, but it's true! My camera was dead, and now it's alive! It seems like such an unimportant thing, but God cared enough about this incident to use it to remind me that He cares for and loves me in such an intimate way, as well as restoring my camera. And even when I feel like I'm not doing much to further His kingdom or like I'm not representing Him very well, like I have been lately, He does things like this to pick me up, sit me on His knee, and look me straight in the eye and tell me just how much He loves me. God is so good!

As many of you know, Sunday was the superbowl! The Rice family took me to church in the morning, I stayed at their house for lunch, and then they took me with them to their house church's superbowl party. It was oddly comforting and familiar. I only watch one football game every year, and this is it. Almost every year I watch it with people from my church at home, and this felt much the same.

I know I've said this before, but I really love my Non-Western Music class. It makes me think a lot about things like what music is, how it is used, and how it affects people. We're studying African music right now, specifically Sub-Saharan Africa. We've talked a lot about how different African tribes use music in their cultures. Many of these tribes use it in a very spiritual way. One tribe we studied, the Kung tribe, uses it in their healing rituals. They believe that when someone becomes ill, it is because they have offended a spirit in some way. They then perform this healing ritual in which they beat on drums, sing vocables (nonsensical syllables), and dance in a circle around those who need healing. They do this until someone goes into a trance. There are many other tribes that do things like this...another one we learned about uses music in their ancestor posession ritual, in which a person from the tribe is believed to be posessed by one of the deceased members of the tribe. I was thinking about all of this, and about how we usually think of music as being such a wonderful and beautiful thing. I'm realizing more and more, though, that music in and of itself is not necessarily good or bad...it is the way we use music that makes it so. It is a beautiful gift from God that man is capable of perverting and twisting, just like so many other things in this world. It is also a gift that has a lot of power. I'm not sure exactly what it is that allows the posession in the tribal rituals I mentioned, but I believe that the presence of music helps it. Music has a huge power to manipulate, focus, magnify, and steer man's thoughts and especially emotions. Think about it...think about the sorts of music played at high school dances and how it probably affects the way young men and women dance to it. Think about your favorite music and how it affects the way you feel. I have never really viewed music in quite this way before, and seeing how man abuses the beautiful gift of music breaks my heart.

Here are some other minor happenings this week:

I learned to make burritos in my microwave. This can now be added to my repetoire of microwaved noodles and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches! Needless to say, I'm pretty excited. :)

Monday we had a surprise fire drill in the dorm at like 10 PM. It was kind of gross. We all meandered outside, slightly inebriated by the piercing, high-pitched alarm. Yes, my viola was with me. :)

Here's a few pictures:

Rebekah took this picture of me before Theory one day. I was trying to make a birthday card for my friend Ethan, but it wasn't going so well. I don't think you're ever too old to color, or at least attempt it. :)

This is that same day in Theory. Matt and I are comparing worksheets. The class is kind of collaborative...no one ever does a worksheet without checking it with other people in the class. Since Dr. Ott is a little....hard to understand sometimes, we sort of teach each other and learn as a whole group.