Have you ever heard the saying “If you want to make God laugh, tell Him your plans”?

I’m not usually a big fan of such cliches, but recently I have found this one to be particularly fitting to my life.  This is a hard one to explain, so bear with me if I start getting vague and abstract.

If you asked me at any given moment in my past if I would lay out the next few years of my life, I would probably have a detailed plan in mind.  However, if you asked me again a few years down the road if my plans actually came to fruition, the answer would almost always be an unequivocal “no.”

I always wanted to go to a school like Stanford or Northwestern, but somehow I found myself at Wheaton College (I know, the “Evangelical Harvard”).  For a while I thought I wanted to be a Spanish teacher, but now I feel myself being drawn toward law.  I never thought I would study in Chile and Paraguay.  I never saw myself working as a camp counselor or as a receptionist at a mental health clinic.  I never really planned any of these things, but they just happened and for the most part they have been the most formative experiences of my 20 years of life.

Ever since I decided to major in Political Science and do the concentration in Pre-law, I have been thinking about the internship requirement I must complete before I graduate.  My plan was to do a legal internship with the government, like with the FBI or a State’s Attorney’s office.  But none of those options really ended up working out.  Then this week an internship with a very prestigious law firm just sort of fell into my lap, and it seems to be a better opportunity than anything I could have planned.

Here’s the point of all this: no matter how hard I try to control and micro-manage my life, I find myself being irresistibly pulled in an unexpected yet exhilerating direction.  There is this feeling that there is something way bigger than me at work.  This is strangely comforting, because I am a mere human being and my life would probably be a total mess if I was the one actually calling the shots.

Maybe I don’t know yet the direction or purpose God has in mind for me, but I do know this: it will be awesome.  And that makes life one big, exciting adventure.

“…but it looks good on a resume!”

I hate hearing that.  Unfortunately, I heard a lot of it in high school (replace “resume” with “college application”) and I hear a lot of it at Wheaton, too.

I will admit I have found myself thinking those words, and when that happened it was time to reconsider my reasons for doing that thing.

When resume-building becomes your only reason for doing something, bail out.  Fast.  It will drain you.

I mailed in a resume and application for a summer internship today. I went to CPO to buy a stamp, and the guy handed over a stamp with a portrait of Jimmy Stewart on it. Since I had gone to a lot of trouble to make the envelope look good by getting a nice envelope from Career Services and printing out the addresses, I was a little hesitant to put Jimmy Stewart’s face on it. I asked the guy if they anything a little more official. It’s not too much to ask, right? I bet a lot of students and staff frequently send out official documents.

The guy responded by saying the other choices were Yoda or X-Men. Here’s to hoping someone at the State’s Attorney’s Office is a Jimmy Stewart fan.

I have always been a big believer in the importance of non-verbal communication.  Today I had an experience that reinforced this belief.

In my World History class we had a guest-lecturer that completely avoided looking at the students while he was lecturing.  There are a ton of students, so this is a difficult feat.  He managed it by looking at the wall above our heads, or at his notes, or down at the ground.  A couple students raised their hands to ask questions, but they were ignored because the professor couldn’t see that their hands were up.  I found the behavior so distracting that it was hard to focus on the actual content of his lecture.

Eye-contact is key.  If you don’t make eye-contact, people will assume one of three things: 1) You are autistic.  2) You are bored and uninterested.  3) You are very uncomfortable or insecure.  In the case of my professor, I would have to go with #3.  His hands were not shaky and his words were clear, but by avoiding all eye-contact with the students, he was sending a signal that he was insecure, either as a general aspect of his personality or maybe just in this situation lecturing to a couple hundred students.  This is an unfortunate habit of his lecture style, and I am sure he is totally unaware of it.  But his audience sure is, and someone should have told him about it ages ago.

Make eye-contact both as a listener and as a speaker.  It is possibly more important than the words you say or any verbal response you may give.  If this is difficult for you, work on it.  Make a conscious attempt.  Do not underestimate the importance of non-verbal communication.

I was walking from my apartment to the dining hall this morning for breakfast before my 9:15am Philosophy class.  A young boy on his way to school turned the corner ahead of me, so I was walking several paces behind him.  We started to pass a church with a parking lot that backs right up to the sidewalk.  There is a curb that divides the parking spaces from the walkway.  Seeing this, the boy jumped up to the curb and began to walk on it as if it were a balance beam.  I tried not to let him see me grinning at this.

I used to do that when I was a kid.  We all did, didn’t we?  When you’re a child, it’s not enough to just walk somewhere.  You look for every possible opportunity to challenge yourself, to test your prowess.  Whether it’s balancing on the curb or trying not to step on the cracks, there was a constant search for stimulation even in a simple walk to school.  That search fades as we grow older.  Now we just look for every opportunity to make life easier.  Sometimes we drive to campus if we don’t feel like walking the whole way.  Sometimes we just stick with the job we know is a safe bet, rather than going after the one that will challenge us even if it means possible failure.

I know people who play it safe in life.  I also know people who constantly seek out challenges that involve risk.  Guess which ones are happier?

Do you ever just catch random snippets of other people’s conversations?  It’s one of my favorite things.  Here’s an example of one I overheard in my Philosophy class this morning:

Kid #1: “I detect some cynicism in your attitude.”

Kid #2: “Yeah, well, I’m a Junior.”

I went to the mall today. I don’t make it to the mall very often these days, and I think from now on I will try to avoid intentionally ever going there again. I really hated it. The second I walked in, I was taken aback by the sheer quantity of middle schoolers. I have a rule that I generally try to stay away from middle schoolers. Remember middle school? Let’s reminisce.

In middle school I discovered sarcasm. It opened up an entire new world for me, and I used it at every possible moment, appropriate or not. My friends thought I was funny- they were middle schoolers too. But looking back I think my sarcastic humor was juvenile and unfunny. I think it was also mostly negative, and sometimes I took it too far and probably hurt other people’s feelings. I have definitely retained a dry sense of humor, but I’ve grown up a lot and it is more controlled.

When I was in middle school, I was pretty sure I knew just about everything there is to know. I thought I was just so smart. By the time I was 13, I was all set, and there wasn’t much left to learn. That was my opinion of my own knowledge until I was about 17, from which point it has been steadily declining. I am now of the opinion that I know absolutely nothing, and the older I get the more I believe that.

I was super judgmental in middle school. Like, the Jerry Falwell, fire and brimstone type. If you swore, if you were gay, if you were pro-choice, if you did any number of certain things I had deemed unacceptable, I shut you out and secretly condemned you to hell. I really distanced myself from relationships with some potentially great people, just because of one aspect I disagreed with. This probably continued until very recently, when I realized all of the awesome friendships I was missing out on.

Physically, I was pretty awkward in middle school. Things started changing faster than I could deal with. I had braces for two years. I also had a pretty strange wardrobe that consisted mainly of ankle-biter jeans and baggy sweatshirts.

I have grown up quite a bit since middle school. Generally I think the changes have been very positive. Two years ago the language arts teacher I had for all three years of middle school invited me and two of her other students to come and talk to her class about high school and college. Like I said, I was a jerk in middle school, but especially to this teacher. When I went back, I could tell how pleasantly surprised she was by how much I had matured. This made me pretty happy. While I generally don’t like reflecting on middle school or being around middle schoolers because it’s just sort of unpleasant, sometimes it’s nice to just compare and contrast the me of today with the me of 8 years ago.

Group projects suck.  I hate them.  Don’t get me wrong, I think interaction between students is an important part of the educational process, but forcing them to write a paper together is almost always a bad idea.

Now, there have been a few instances where group projects are acceptable or even enjoyable.  Usually these assignments have been for my Spanish classes.  In high school we always had to form small groups and perform random skits.  They were fun, they were a chance to be creative, and for the most part we were graded on our individual speaking ability.

However, a group project that does not take the form of a presentation or a skit, but rather an essay, is usually a recipe for disaster.  And if you’ve ever had to do this, you know what I mean.  The work load doesn’t get split up evenly, someone doesn’t do what they’re supposed to, the group doesn’t agree on some key point, and even when the thing finally gets handed in no one is completely satisfied.

Teachers: listen up.  If you must insist upon inflicting some sort of group project on you pupils, here is how it should be done:

1.  It should not be an essay in any way, shape, or form.  It should be a public presentation or skit, where the amount of work each member does is obvious and everyone has a chance to play on their strengths.

2.  When grading, there should be an easy way to separate the individual members of the group.  Students should never be assigned a “group grade.”  This usually involves good students getting worse grades than they should, and bad students getting better grades than they should.

3.  The project should not count for a large part of the grade.  Like I mentioned in #2, group projects tend to have a neutralizing effect on grades, and it’s unfair if it counts for a huge portion of the overall grade.

4.  The project should involve some sort of creative element.  Students are more likely to take creative risks in groups.  A student might not be willing to make a video presentation by himself because of the social fears of failure involved, but he might if the risk was diffused amongst a group.  Use the opportunity to find out what the students can create without social inhibitions.

So that’s my advice to teachers.  And it’s not just the complaining of one introverted student who doesn’t play well with others, I’m almost positive most of us feel this way.  Take it for what it’s worth.

Sometimes, when I’m at home and I’m really bored, I like to go through the drawers in my room. You see, like my parents and their parents before them, I have a hard time throwing/giving all my old crap away. I come from a long line of pack rats! Therefore, my drawers are filled with Hanson CDs, my old basketball card collection, Paraguayan currency, and broken watches. Not everything is junk, though. There are exactly three small drawers in my room filled with things I will never throw away. They are these drawers that I rummage through when I need a little encouragement.

One of these drawers, the smallest, is in my bedside table. It’s about the size of a cigar box, and it’s filled with uplifting letters I have received. These notes, that probably took someone 5 minutes to write, are priceless gifts that keep encouraging even after years have passed. Some of them are the end-of-session letters I got from my counselors at HoneyRock. I remember how much I looked up to them, and how my heart soared when, a few weeks after camp ended, I (or rather my parents) would get a letter with their assessment of my talents and contributions to our cabin group. I remembered how much those letters meant to me when I was the one writing them to my own campers at the end of the summer two years ago. In that drawer is also a stack of notes that my senior year Spanish class wrote. We spent an entire class period at the end of the year just jotting brief notes of encouragement to each other. I had gone through 12 years of school with some of these kids, and even if we weren’t close friends it was great to read some of the things they liked or admired about me. The rest of the letters in that drawer are random, miscellaneous correspondences I have received from friends, and it always does my heart good to look through that drawer. Everyone should write encouraging notes to each other. And everyone should have a drawer like this.

I have two other desk drawers that are filled with academic and athletic accolades from high school. Certificates, medals, pins, and letter jacket patches. I was a pretty good student, you see, so besides my diploma in that drawer there are awards from the AP Board, the Principal, the school board, and the National Merit Corporation. I was also a pretty good athlete. Badminton, to be exact (yes, it is a real sport). So because of that I have a lot of medals and IHSA state qualifier pins and letter jacket patches. These are also great drawers to look through every once in while. It’s pretty gratifying to hold concrete representations of my past successes in my hands. I’m no longer an athlete, but I’m still a pretty good student, and you just don’t receive physical accolades like you used to in high school. Why is that? I miss it.

The additions to these drawers have slowed down somewhat significantly since I graduated high school. I don’t play sports so I don’t get any medals. Wheaton College doesn’t give out academic achievement awards, at least until I graduate. And I don’t get letters as much as I get emails, the nature of which is increasingly business. I guess the older you get, the less you need to be told that you’re awesome in the form of paper or medals. You just have to figure it out yourself. I’m sorry, but I don’t really agree with that. Everyone should be periodically told, outright, how great they are. I don’t do that often enough for other people, and I think I should start.

Last week I wrote about a show I went to called Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind in Chicago. Well, Wheaton College has started publishing a monthly paper of activities and fun things to do in the area. I noticed that they listed a show called That’s Weird, Grandma which caught my eye because it plays at the same theater as Too Much Light. I checked out their web page and learned that the show is produced by an organization called “Barrel of Monkeys,” where performers team up with schools to teach creative writing to children and encourage the expression of their voices and imaginations.

Really, you guys, hearing about an organization like Barrel of Monkeys makes my heart so happy. This is a group of really talented people. They could just be performing in plays and improv troupes around Chicago in order to pay the rent and pursue their own dreams of success. However, these guys are sacrificing their time and efforts to bring their skills and inspiration to inner-city school children. They’re taking something they’re good at, something they’re passionate about, and they’re using it to help other people.

I guess my impending graduation and lack of direction has got me thinking a lot recently about the concepts of purpose and talent. Bill Hybels once gave a great talk on this subject. The basic gist was that when people with gifts and passions find their purpose in life, watch out world, because something awesome is gonna happen. I don’t know what the story behind Barrel of Monkeys is, but I like to think some performer or writer saw an unfulfilled need in the city’s public school system, but instead of sitting around yelling at politicians through the TV, they relentlessly pursued the fulfillment of that need through their own talents. If that’s the case, then that’s awesome. Everyone in this world needs to do something like that. I see people like that, and my heart is just filled to the brim with hope for this world.

On the other hand, sometimes I see people who have such enormous talent. Such huge potential. And they’re doing nothing. They dropped out of college and are free-loading off their parents. They work at WalMart, but only so they can have extra cash to buy video games and weed. And I just want to scream at these people. What are you doing? You had so much going for you, and you’re throwing it all away. You could have done something huge. It’s one of the most upsetting things in world to me.

I want to do something huge. I just don’t know what yet. I’m not an artist, and my talents are a little harder to pinpoint. And I still have no idea what my purpose might be. But just you wait. Meanwhile, I’m open to suggestions