The end of summer school is near (random tidbits of this and that)

I only have about 2 hours of class left before I'm officially done classes at school here in Victoria. I'm still in the education program, so I don't officially get certified as a teacher and graduate with my diploma until next April or May, but I only have a couple hours of class time left before I leave the school permanently.

This summer's been a bit crazy. Between finishing my undergrad classes in April, moving to Calgary for the month of May, doing 3 months of summer school, and preparing to move my life back to the mainland, it's been a little overwhelming. I've also had the pleasure of having numerous visitors over the past couple months, and K and I have even been able to escape for a day or two here and there... not to mention working every weekend at the pub. Needless to say, I haven't had a massive amount of free time. This is starting to sound like a pity party, so I'll move on.

I was thinking the other day about one of the interesting (or wholly boring and nerdish) experiences of my teen days. I used to spend a lot of time arguing religion at an online "bulletin board", as a way of working through my own personal faith. It was a strange time, as I was at the height of my argumentative stage with my parents and I did my best to get into fights with them about the most trivial of things. But as I spent more time on the BB arguing faith and working out the major problems I saw with modern traditions in the Christian church, I came across some ideas that always made me smile. One was the Biblical story of Jacob, who was renamed "Israel", which was supposed to mean "He who wrestled with angels" after he caught a messenger angel and refused to let him leave before Jacob was blessed... they wrestled all night and finally the angel blessed him and he was renamed Israel (Gen 32.9). For a while on the board, I referred to myself as a sort of child of Jacob, and I saw my religious conflict in these terms. Later on, I encountered a man who signed off every post with a passage from Proverbs... 25:2 to be exact. Although the wording changes from translation to translation, the gist of the passage is as follows: "It is the will of God to conceal a matter, but the glory of Kings to search out an issue". I've always loved this passage, as it seems to be representative of my relatively constant questioning of faith and religion.

Enough about these random musings... I'll leave a quote from R.W. Emerson before I go, since he's just Mr. Quotable...

"There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernal of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till"
- Emerson, Essay on "Self-Reliance"

In all his convoluted wisdom, he was a bit of a self-assured optimist. I guess we can all take the advice that, at the end of the day, it's simply up to us.

- T