City Serve 4-19-2009

Today, Supernova was supposed to bring a bunch of stuff to this house reserved for a Nepali refugee family and set their house up. Unfortunately, we got lost on the way and circled around Lake Shore and went back and forth between Chicago and Evanston approximately 532 times. So in the end, we just dropped the stuff off and went to have lunch at Indiatown. Most of us stuffed ourselves at this Indian buffet, and we managed to squeeze free beverages out of the restaurant!

You might find this funny. Courtesy of NotAlwaysRight.com:

Tech Support: “All right…now double-click on the File Manager icon.”

Customer: “That’s why I hate this ‘Windows’–because of the icons–I’m a Protestant, and I don’t believe in icons.”

Tech Support: “Well, that’s just an industry term sir. I don’t believe it was meant to-”

Customer: “I don’t care about any ‘industry terms’. I don’t believe in icons.”

Tech Support: “Well…why don’t you click on the ‘little picture’ of a file cabinet…it’s a ‘little picture’, okay?”

Customer: *hangs up*

LIFE Group 4.15.2009

Last night we had a great LIFE group gathering at Penny's apartment, where we ate brownies and strawberries (yum!) and had a very great discussion about faith, deeds, and even the hardening of the Pharaoh's heart. We are looking forward to City Serve this Sunday!!

If anyone has prayer requests, please post them!

Welcome Spring Quarter!

Today was the first Life Group of spring quarter, we met in the Kemper lounge and had a great time sharing about our various spring break experiences and also looking forward to the rest of this quarter. We want to finish strong and on a high note! Hannah passed back the letters that we wrote to ourselves earlier this year, back on 10/22/2008, almost half a year ago, and many of us were surprised by how much we have/have not changed since then.

Things to look forward to and pray for:
1) our own themes for this upcoming quarter like discernment, engage, finish strong, love, don't forget God, humility, witnessing, get out.
2) The upcoming all-night prayer night this Friday.
3) Witnessing to our dorm mates next Wednesday! (baking perhaps?)

Lifegroup March 18, 2009

This was the last Lifegroup for the winter quarter. Byron came to join us! We walked to Stacy's house and had grilled cheese and bacon sandwich, dumplings, tomato soup, and root beer float. We talked about Northwestern and stuff... and Albert forced most of us to this sports thing and whoever wins gets a free meal...?? Later, we disbanded.

Have a great spring break everyone! Good luck to those on the mission trip!

Lent

Hey guys, just wanted to share with you that I am giving up TV shows for Lent this year. That includes watching TV leisurely as well, especially watching sports highlights or games on television (I'm going to allow movies for now). To give you an idea of how this has consumed a lot of time in my life, below is a list of TV shows I was up to date with at one point in time since my JUNIOR year of high school:

Battlestar Galactica, 24, The Office, Friday Night Lights, House, Lost, Veronica Mars, The West Wing, Gilmore Girls, Heroes, One Tree Hill, Prison Break, Grey's Anatomy, Family Guy, The Unit, Las Vegas, Numb3rs, Bones, Eureka, Jericho, October Road.

Since then, I've given up at least 80% of these shows, however I still ended up spending 4-5 hours a week keeping up to date with my favorite ones.

One thing that I wanted to do was to watch each episode with a group of people from my floor every week, and during Fall Quarter, this happened quite a lot, which was great for community and to give each of us something to talk about. But since then, less people have joined me in my room to watch the weekly House episode or the Office episode, and I ended up watching these shows by myself.

So during ACCESS on Friday, I thought it would be a good idea to give up another facet of entertainment in my life (last year, it was video games and computer games).

During these 40 or so days, I hope to spend those hours I would've spent on a television show by meditating on the Lord and His Word. I also hope that after this Lenten season is over, that my focus on TV shows would greatly diminish, as well as the time I spend on them per week. Most of all, I want to redirect my desire for earthly things and possessions, and place that focus towards God, our LIFE group, people, studies, etc. Please pray for me during these times =).

Lifegroup 2-25-2009

Today, we all plotted a special type of graph: level of exuberance or spirituality (spiritons) as a function of time. Everyone had a nice curve for their function, whether it be piecewise smooth, high curvature, linear, exponential, logarithmic, asymptotic, undefined at certain intervals of the domain, or just plainly has a high positive y-intercept. We've all had our local and absolute minima and maxima, but let's hope that the graph of our entire life turns out to be concave up in its entirety with a high positive value for the first-order and second-order derivatives for the most part and near the end. Life is not a state function, so let's give everything we have got along every infinitesmal segment of our arc lengths.

Broomball

GO SUPERNOVA! SECOND PLACE!