come with me now to see my world, where there's beauty beyond your dreams

College is ripping my heart out. I mean really, I come home sobbing every day and curl up in a ball on my bed and lay there for hours too stunned to think or move.

Okay, not really. But I do occasionally start doodling in big, angry lines to keep myself from standing up in the middle of class and yelling (princess-bride style), "Liar! Liar!" Because it's so frusterating.

And the depressing part is that most of these people arn't christian-haters or terrible individuals. They arn't deliberatly trying to brainwash us or anything like that- they're just blind. Hoplessly so. I continually get the feeling that given the oporotunity, I could easily convince my whole class to come to Christ. I mean, that's not true, but I feel like it is- because the things they are buying into are so much more ridiculous and so much more hopeless. Like, they have GOT to be starving for something real and honest and true and full of LIFE!

My mom thinks it's not healthy to sit under teachers who inturpret texts with a bias for or against anything. In Oxford, she says, people don't do that. They just teach the material. That may be so, but I've never been more sure of what I believe than I am right now, with all my teachers talking about Christianity as though it's obviously rubbish. It's thick with bias, but it gives me a chance to think about why what they are saying isn't true, and usually the answers are right on the surface.

I think I used to always see Christianity as a side, as one possible answer out of many. And it was my job to defend my side and back it up with as much proof as possible so that people couldn't knock down my arguments. There are elements of truth in that view, but I think now my religion is more of a lense. There are things that I know to be true in ways that can never be backed up with logical arguments. And once I've accepted those things, everything else makes so much more sense. It's gloriously clear. It's beautiful, it's breathtaking, it's TRUE. But you can't see things through that lense until you've accepted the lense its self, until you've chosen to put on the glasses in spite of how ridiculous you might look wearing them.

Hum, I think I'm basically quoting C.S. Lewis here without realizing it. What's that famous line? I believe in Christianity like I believe in the sun, not because I can see it but because by it I see everything else? Something like that.

You know what is amazing? In the art class I'm taking with Beth and Liz we just got to the part where Christianity starts to influence art. From a purely historical point of view, this is where Christianity actually started- in the Roman times at the comming of Christ. Because before that there wern't Christians, just jews. It's fascinating to see how it looks from the outside. This man comes along claiming to be the son of God and gains a huge following, which has all of these twists and turns we never even think about. Like, the religion became something outside of its self, taking on a life of it's own that true believers probably lamented all along.

First it became the official state religion, which ruined it in so many ways, and then catholisism came along, and the crusades happened. Suddenly we're fanatics with an adgenda. Religion for the sake of religion. Oh boy, it's serious stuff.

When the teacher asked what kind of Christians you would get by forcing people to convert at knife-point, one kid replied with, "They'd be no worse than the rest of them." And I don't blame him, because things haven't changed all that much- we really are a lot of hypocrites chanting meaningless religion if we don't follow it up with dilligent morality. We don't stop enough to ask ourselves how we should be acting. We don't turn over every stone and see what the absolute best decision would be. We try to eak by with minimims... I do it all the time.

But the true power of the gospel is that in will change you, if you really go into it all the way. Right? And if that's really true, and we really live it, than there's always hope for the people in our lives. That's so exciting, and so terrifying, at the same time.