All Good Things...

In nine days, I will take my last final and pack away the last of my belongings for either the long road home or the long summer in storage. Montreat is a second home to me now, or perhaps my primary home, and I hate to leave it. I will miss the people and the mountains. They are Montreat. They are home.

I have learned a lot this semester, about myself, about friendship, about human nature, about being in a strong community. There's no place like Montreat. I'm just glad I'm not graduating yet!

Another thing I'm grateful for is this age of cameras. I have hundreds and hundreds of pictures on my own computer and hundreds more I can access via Facebook. As I look back through my photos, a story comes out. A bit choppy, but a story all the same.

The first day of NSO. Here I am with (most of) my siblings. Eddie's goodness-knows-where.






Ah, there he is. This was my first time in my dorm room. It looked strange and new to me. Now it's my bedroom, office, kitchen, bathroom, library, and attic all rolled into one!





Me and some friends at the NSO coffeehouse. If I look depressed, it's because I was-- my family had just left, and I wouldn't see them for seven weeks.






Me, Marta, and Sarah. We're the Three New England Musketeers!








Look at me, all dressed up for formal!













At the end of Christmas break, five of my friends came up to New Hampshire and we spent a week bonding and goofing off. Here's me and my friend/future roommate Imari asleep one morning. I'm curled up in the corner, and little Imari-- she's only 5-2, she doesn't usually take up much space-- has most of the bed.



Me and Imari again, playing in the snow one day in January when school was canceled.








Here's me and a bunch of friends on our way up the Lookout trail. Yes, we're wearing short sleeves; it's about 70 degrees, but there was still snow on the mountain.





Me and my roommate, Laura.









Me, Marta, and her little cousins over Easter break. We stayed with their family for the weekend and went on hikes and had streamside picnics. It was a ton of fun.






Aha! Here's the awesome fort we Lost Boys had for Pan Day. We totally one-upped the pirates-- all they had was a propped-up strip of plywood painted to look shippy.






And here we are, at today. I have no pictures for what tomorrow holds; the future is a mystery. What happens over the next several days and months is in God's hands, and he'll take care of it. In the meantime, my adventure is at an end, and I prepare to bid Montreat and my dear friends a tearful and heartfelt adieu. But only until August. Then another adventure begins!

The Beginning of the End

"It's the end of the world as we know it." The popular song blared through the loudspeakers at the Spring Formal last night. It was a fun time of socializing and dancing after Pan Day, though it was rather an odd change of pace. The song was dedicated to the graduating seniors, and it made me sad. It really is the end of the world as they know it. They're moving out of the dorms for the last time, and the world outside Montreat is like nothing they've yet known.

And it's the end of the world I've become accustomed to, as well.

Summer is almost here, and we all have to leave. Will I be lost without all my friends? I'll have only my family and one or two old friends when I get back home. How will I survive? Will I be lonely? Will I die of boredom? I don't know.

I will always be learning, my faith is always with me, and it's tough to leave technology behind. So I'll be figuring out how to integrate the three all through the summer. Right now, my best example is this blog.

Think about it. First, I had to learn how to work this thingtechnology. Then my first few posts got me thinking about my faith. It was like a prayer journal, really. So I've actually been integrating faith, learning, and technology this whole time, and I didn't even realize it! Technology is a good way to learn, and a good way to express my faith. They really are connected!

Pan Day!

How do you know who wins? What's the point? To beat the snot out of each other?

Pan Day is an old Montreat College tradition. Few people remember how it really started, but at some point a couple students decided to reenact the battle for Neverland from "Hook," the movie. Sides were chosen, and Lost Boys and Indians joined together to pummel the pirates into the dust. The event grew, and now, Pan Day occurs every spring on the Dust Bowl down the road. We get to dress up in costumes, go to class with swords and scare the adjuncts, and then whomp the tar out of each other at the battle that afternoon.

So who does win? I really don't know. I was just in the Pan Day battle yesterday, and I'm still not sure. Though Peter Pan did kill Hook, so maybe us Lost Boys won.

The point of Pan Day is really to blow off steam. It's an excellent way to let out those end-of-the-year, oh-my-gosh-finals-are-next-week-and-I'm-incredibly-stressed feelings that build up over the last few weeks of the semester. Pan Day gets us outside, away from the technology and emails constantly reminding us what's next in our busy schedules.

When Jesus was tired, he'd take a break in the wilderness and pray to his Father. Refreshed, he'd return to the towns and feed thousands of people, heal the sick, and catch oodles of fish. The wilderness is important. Even Jesus left his schedule behind sometimes. We learned a valuable lesson from this. We took a break for Pan Day, and now that we've returned, we're ready to stand up tall and face the giants ahead of us. Sometimes, the best way to integrate faith, learning, and technology is to take a break.

The Lost Boys!









The Pirates. Grrr....

Spring

A hummingbird zips up to my third-story dorm window and sips from the hummingbird feeder suction cupped to the glass. So cute. Their little wings, little feet, little selves. They're tiny little bundles of magic.

I know a lot about hummingbirds. Well, birds in general, but I'm talking about hummingbirds now. They can't walk or hop on their tiny feet; they fly everywhere they want to go. They're literally helpless on the ground. Hummers are also the only birds that have the ability to move in every direction in flight; straight up, straight down, left, right, forward, and even backward. Their wings move so fast that you can hardly see them. Their feathers are iridescent, and the colors can only be seen at exactly the right angle. Otherwise, they look black.

God made hummingbirds. And seeing them reminds me of just how creative He is. I mean, I never would have thought to make such a tiny bird with such special abilities.

This is the first time I've had a hummingbird feeder. But I already knew all this information about hummers. How, if I'd hardly ever seen them? Books. Magazines. Online databases. Text books. All of those are part or results of technology. Ever since the printing press, the written word has been massively circulated. Field guides are very popular nowadays. They contain information on birds, trees, plants, and even rocks, depending on the book, all in a compact, portable form. Very convenient. I have several field guides for birds, a few for plants, and two for mammals. When I want to look up something in the house, if I'm not too curious about the organism itself, I type in the description to Google Images, and pictures will pop up. It's a fast way to get the information I want.

By learning about hummingbirds through books and my own observations, I learn about God. Have you ever seen the structure of an iridescent feather? It's really something. The light reflects off it just right, and a flash of color greets you. Beautiful. And who made that feather? I sure know.

Pushing Back the Curtain

I've been thinking about this faith/learning/technology mystery for a while now, and am only just now getting around to posting. I see a little bit of the integration when I'm writing papers and studying for New Testament class. For papers, sometimes I use Bible verses. It's a lot easier to go to Biblegateway.com and type in the phrase I want than to dig through my Bible for a reference. But that seems a weak integration. I could get along fine without the technology. It doesn't really have much to do with my faith, quite frankly.

I really need to define technology. It could mean computer technology, obviously, and that's what I've been thinking about, since this is, after all, a computer class. But really, technology is anything human-made. An axe is technology. So is the physical equipment I use in biology lab. So that's where I turned to next.

Just yesterday, I extracted my own DNA from my own cheek cells and poked at it with an unbent paper clip. The fact that all my genetic makeup was contained in that stringy glob of clear, thread-like structures was amazing. God made me out of that? That's how he told my body what to look like? He knit me from that tiny, delicate yarn? He knit everybody from such yarn? It seemed so impossible, at the same time so simple, and yet still amazing. My God is very great. That's what I learned from using the seemingly simple technology of test tubes, salt water, and ethanol. The technology helped me to learn about science, and about my God. Now that's integration!

Faith, Learning, and Technology

I finally saw an obvious integration of faith, learning, and technology. It was in biology class. We watched a video about DNA replication and protein synthesis. It was made by a Christian group of scientists, and touched on things like Irreducible Complexity while also teaching us about the science of it all. Irreducible Complexity is the idea that many things are so complex that if one component was removed, it would cease to function. So, there's really no way such a system or object could have come about by change. The complexity is so irreducible that it shows definite signs of intelligent and intentional creation.

It's been hard for me to comprehend the integration of faith, learning, AND technology. I've done faith and learning together, but I'm an environmental studies major-- technology is not necessarily big in my mind as something that can be integrated with my faith and schooling. It was obvious to me that you could integrate learning and technology, but how do you mix faith into all of it? That's the question I will seek to answer.

Cam Studio

As I type this, I am running the recording software, CamStudio. It is taking a video of everything I do on the desktop. Pretty cool. I could use this for dozens of things. I could even make tutorials of games and Microsoft word and stuff. See attached video.