Tomorrow marks the 3 week mark for my first year of college at the University of Texas. It feels like I’ve been here for 5 years already some days, but others feel like I just got here yesterday.
I went to my first UT football game (against Rice at Reliant) on Labor Day with my mom and had a blast. I didn’t realize how much I missed my family (that includes Daisy) until I got back home. My parents have always been there for me and it’s just strange living away from them. I probably won’t be going home for a while, so it’s going to be an experience.
This past Saturday was the first home game, and I must say it was amazing. We played Wyoming and won (duh). It was a pretty good game spent with great friends, Kaitlyn, Sunayana, and Allegra, even if we were at the very tip top of DKR Stadium. I have a cousin coming at the end of the month and we were planning to go see the UCLA game, but evidently tickets to that particular game are in high demand as they sold out in a day. I am extremely bummed and feel bad that my cousin won’t get to go to the game like she planned, but I’m sure we’ll figure out a way to have some fun.
Just so you’re not misguided, there is more to my life than football games and long drives home. There is chemistry class with crazy concepts and much expected of you – even on the first day. There is my statistics class where much of the work is done in Excel (which, if you don’t know me- I repel technology. It’s a struggle for me to say the least.) Then there is my theatre class where we read graphic plays about misery, violence, homosexuals, AIDS, and sex. Not my idea of a relaxing afternoon read. And I have a few other classes/responsibilities academically, but that’s the gist of it.
But before any of that, a few friends and I have been attending church at Hill Country Bible UT, and it has been great. It’s a smaller church of 87% college students. It’s awesome to see so many college kids worshipping at 9:30am on a Sunday morning, and those same kids worshipping on Wednesday evenings, knowing how busy they are and how they don’t have anyone here to tell them they HAVE to go. They worship because they want to. They worship because God is great. The pastor has been going through the book of Acts on Sunday mornings and has been talking about the undeniable power of God. It was kind of ironic because I just started reading a book called Forgotten God, by Francis Chan, that pretty much coincides with the topic.
The book is about how we claim to have God in our lives, but we forget that the Holy Spirit (which is God) actually lives in us and through us. In the last chapter I read, it talked about what our lives should look like after the Holy Spirit enters it. Chan compared it to a person saying that God came into their body and gave them an amazing athletic ability…people expect to be able to SEE that athletic ability. If not, they probably won’t find much truth in your claim. The same goes for your claim that the Holy Spirit lives inside you. If you tell people that, they expect you to be different. Along with that idea comes the power that we’ve been looking at in the book of Acts. The Holy Spirit is God. God is all powerful. Therefore, the Holy Spirit is all powerful. If you have accepted Jesus Christ as your savior, that all powerful God lives inside you. You have that power living inside you. Shouldn’t that affect the way you live? The way I live? The way we all live as Christians? I’ve realized that after 3 weeks of college, it’s easy to forget about things. You can get so caught up in studying and trying to not be a recluse because of that studying that it’s easier to just say, “I’ll talk to you later, God.” It’s also easy to ignore the fact that it’s not your life that you’re living. You’re only alive through Jesus Christ who lives in you as a Christ follower. The Holy Spirit sustains us, yet we ignore Him like He’s not even there. It’s just been very convicting for me to see these things in myself and in others the past few weeks and I’m working on it every day.
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