First Day of School

Well, in about one hour I will go to my first class as a graduate student at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. I feel like I've already begun, as I already have tons to read and am jumping into two research projects with faculty. Both are interesting and both involve adolescents, so I'm pretty excited. All of the current graduate students that I've met so far keep telling us that we just have to brace ourselves and make it through the first year, and I'm ready to actually start and stop having to wonder about all of the unknowns with the program. This semester I have four classes in addition to the two research projects, and I'm also supposed to be doing my own research and reading as I begin to consider what I want to do for my masters thesis next year.

In other news, Joy and I visited a church yesterday that we loved. Oxford Bible Fellowship is right on the corner of Miami's campus, and the pastor went to Moody and is taking some classes at Trinity (the church is an Evangelical Free Church), so we were able to talk about Chicago together. Joy and I arrived about five minutes before the service was about to start, and it was PACKED. It was the first weekend with the college students back, and they came out in full force. They ended up putting in more seats wherever they could, and people were sitting on the floor, on window ledges, and a bunch of guys sat in the choir loft on stage. They ended up having to add seats to the foyer because they couldn't let anyone else in the sanctuary. Needless to say, it was a pretty sweet thing to witness, and the energy was so fun. We both would have thought we were at a Christian college chapel as opposed to a church at a public university, but then various organizations like Campus Crusade and the Navigators spoke about the various ministries around the university. As I sat on a make-shift chair in the very back, I couldn't help but reflect on how beautiful the whole thing was and was simply blessed to be a part of it.

Now I gotta get to class! Here we go!!!