Farewell to Summer

Well summer, it's been great spending time with you, and now it's time to get ready for the new school year. I'm going to start off by saying how shocked I am that I am no longer a first-year student and am starting my second year of college. It scares me, and I wonder if I am spending my time here on Earth purposefully. It really is making me reevaluate my life and how I approach my friends and school.

I am so glad I stayed here on campus for the summer. I really strengthened good friendships, made new friends, and just this past week, got to meet all the incoming first-year international students that come a week early for orientation. It has been so cool getting to know them, and I know for sure next year that I will be a mentor for the new students in 2016. I thought I wasn't extroverted enough to do it this year, but I think that I didn't give myself enough credit. I'm just hanging out with all of them anyway, so I might as well be a mentor, and not to toot my own horn or anything, but I am somewhat of a good leader because leadership skills come with being the first born of a household of 7.

I'm actually a terrible leader, probably

I really feel like God has given me a passion for international students, and I really enjoy being around them, for some reason I can relate more to them than I can to the other American students on campus. They are more friendly, kind, caring for one another, and more seriously about the important stuff, a characteristic I really admire because I like to take school seriously and be diligent.

The fact that I am friends with the international students is sort of funny to me when I compare who I am now to who I was when I first started college. I remember filling out the online housing form before coming to college and selecting that I did not want to room with an international student, thinking that I would not be able to communicate clearly with them and that I wouldn't be helpful to someone from a different country. Little did I know that all of my really close friends would be international and that I was going to feel called to be friends with these awesome people.

God moves in mysterious ways. I know that God wanted me to be at college over the summer, and I have grown in so many ways and have learned to see a lot of things differently for the better. I cannot wait to see what He has in store for me next year and I am so excited to see how His plan unfolds.

War and Peace: A Review of Sorts

I finally finished War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy this past week while I was on vacation. I had been reading it since the end of June, and as a result felt very depressed when I read the last line of the book, and finished what I had been reading for about two months. In short, this book was amazing and you should definitely read it, if you are reading this.

There is so much to be learned from this book, about life, about love, about the purpose of being, and most simple, about the human mind and its ways. It is, obviously, the deepest and most thought-provoking novel I have ever read, and I recommend it to anyone. It is well worth your time, despite the 1200+ pages of the vast novel.

The main characters are phenomenally crafted and created, you get a special feeling for them, you become attached to them as if they are indeed real and living right before your eyes. Even though I did not understand the strategies of battle (the book is set during the Napoleon war), I was able to clearly understand what was going on and why is was important from Tolstoy's descriptive writing.

I am not writing a plot summary here. I believe that would spoil the book, which is massively long. However, you will fall in love with the characters stories and themselves, and I will say this; my favorite character is Prince Andrei for his brilliant and final understanding of life and love. This quote pretty much sums up what I love about him:

“Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source.”

This struck me as being quite profound, as well as this quote spoken by Pierre, the main character:

"Life is everything. Life is God. Everything shifts and moves, and this movement is God. And while there is life, there is delight in the self-awareness of the divinity. To love life is to love God. The hardest and most blissful thing is to love this life in one's suffering, in the guiltlessness of suffering."

There are not enough words to describe how much I loved this book. Just read it, it is quite the accomplishment, and it will teach you many things.

I'm also quite excited for the new BBC miniseries coming out late this year, starring James Norton as Prince Andrei: