Summer
Days, Slipping Away
June 23, 2000
Headed on the 8-hour trek to Indiana with mom
and sis! I still don’t know what I
think. I’ve never been truly excited
about spending my summer at college . . . 5 weeks of Calculus all summer?!
June 24, 2000
Has this only been one day? I feel like I’ve known these people for
years, like I’ve lived here forever! My
roomies are the greatest in the world!
What a blessing! Already, in
between the excitement of making our dorm home, we’ve burst into spontaneous
moments of holding hands and praying together; we are already so single-minded.
June 26-27, 2000
Classes began: a shock of reality! This is going to be a looooong week. The first few days have found me completely
inundated by HOMEWORK! Absolutely
mandatory homework has kept me up till 3:30 the past two nights! I’ve always thought I had good
time-management skills, but the college schedule came as a shock. I’m glad I’m learning it now, though! It’s not like “school” -- school all day,
homework in the evening, free nights to study.
Instead, classes and activities are spread throughout the day and homework
must be squeezed into the small hours between these scattered class
periods. My planner has not left my
sight! So much for the college
sleep-ethic. Sleep? None of that around here!
June 28, 2000
Ah, today was the happiest day!!! Perhaps it was the perfect weather -- I spent
all day in creative study spots (isn’t college great?). Perhaps it was because I finally got my schedule
under control. I found ways to minimize
time-wasting by nailing down distractions and time-wasters, like walking all
the way to the dorm between classes.
Instead, I brought all my books with me and studied in the quiet dining
commons until lunch. Perhaps it was the
spontaneity. There’s nothing like a
midnight Steak and Shake-run to top off a lovely day! Or perhaps it was the people. Studying with friends -- spending the evening
over Calculus, laughing till we cried -- oh, I cannot wait for college!
June 29, 2000
Team homework is absolutely miserable! I love the guys -- I’m the only girl in my
class of 6 -- but they WILL NOT work as a team!
I’m learning a lot about trust.
Homeschooling has taught me to be in control: I’d rather do all of the team problems myself
so that I could be confident that they were right than have to surrender and
trust the guys, resting my confidence in them.
It’s terrifying, and yet so sweet.
Trust.
July 29, 2000
“The end of a matter,” Dr. Cosgrove, my
worldviews-class professor, began, “is better than the beginning.” It is sadder, he continued, but you are
better off than you were at the beginning: you changed, you grew, you
learned. With a few words from staff and
profs, the closing banquet marked the dreaded end of summer honors. We clung tenaciously to the quickly-escaping
hours, gathered in the grass outside our empty dorm, stubbornly refusing to
sleep, refusing to lose even a few of those precious final minutes. It was a picture-perfect night, complete with
a campfire and worship songs, a final reminiscing walk around campus, and a 2am
Krispy Kreme run. . . . And then the
morning came too soon. The sky
brightened. We began to drift off into
sleep: our final night was over.
August 6, 2000
It’s been a week since Summer Honors: it seems
like forever ago and yet so close. Time
is such a strange and fickle thing.
Everything I learned this summer was about time. I learned about TIME in Calculus (time,
velocity, rates of change, etcetera), TIME management, and TIMEless
moments: those special moments when time
stood still, those moments that suggest that I was not created for this earthly
environment of time, but for eternity.
“All
our most lovely moments perhaps are timeless.
We wish to know, to savour, to sink in -- into the heart of the
experience -- to possess it wholly. But
there was never enough time; something still eluded us. The pressure of time was our nearly
inescapable awareness of an approaching terminus. . . . If we complain of time
-- we are unable, despite a thousand generations, even to get used to it -- and
take such joy in the seemingly timeless moment, what does that suggest? Perhaps it suggests, as I believe, that we
have not always been or will not always be purely temporary creatures. It suggests that we were created for
eternity.” -Sheldon Vanauken, from “A Severe Mercy”
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