Well, it's been nearly a week since I posted. The life of Ludwhig rolls on as usual. This really developed into three separate posts, but I'm semi-typing them together, so thus the lines of asterisks. I do it more often than I've noticed anyway.

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Manana, mi madre, hermana Candace, y yo vamos a Chicago porque queremos visitar la universidad.

How's my Spanish holding up? Candace and I listened to this Spanish review CD on the way to a college Bible study. So I started typing a few words of that sentence in Spanish, and finally decided to try and do the whole thing.

Regardless of my grammar, the sentence really means that tomorrow, my mom, Candace and I will be visiting the University of Chicago. I'm considering it for graduate school and so we figured might as well visit it.

I set up a meeting with the anthropology department administrator, as well as one of their archaeology students. Take a wild guess what I'm interested in at this time...



Yeah, well, in the total absence of any further direction, I just picked that and off we go. Odds are I'll change it before grad school time comes.

Since I can't really say where I want to go with this whole academic thing after LETU, why not just chill for a bit before grad school? I might, but it seems the one thing I truly am interested in is grad school. The mere question is... what to study?

There are a jillion fine options, and not really one that sticks out.

But maybe I'll get a little clue to that tomorrow. Chicago will be one more big city to check off of my list of big cities in the US to see... all that remain are San Francisco and New York City, I think.

So, grab your fedora and whip, it's off to the U of Chicago we go!

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C.S. Lewis most earns my respect in the Chronicles of Narnia for an entirely different, uncommon and scintillating take on the things of God. He doesn't bring out any new truth; he just takes the dusty, jaded truth we've grown accustomed to and shows it for the wonderful thing it really is.

I suppose this is common in a lot of his writing, which is brilliant. But in the Chronicles of Narnia, it comes out most in his depiction of Aslan.

I'm in Prince Caspian, and in it Aslan appears to Lucy but not to the other three children. He asks her to follow him, and even to make the others follow him, though they cannot initially see him.

Lucy's transformation from a pouting girl to a dedicated follower of Aslan constitutes probably the finest allegorical picture of the book.

Aslan is wild. Always different, always kind, always wise, but never what you expect. That is a part of God I have experienced in a special way recently.

Obviously, we can always expect God to remain true to His attributes, but when I say He is never what we expect... I mean that He has higher and better plans than we do, and they are never what we expect.

I'll be specific. I was a chaplain on my college floor last year and the entire process has seemed to be *not* what I wanted. Let me explain.

My freshman year, a lot of the upperclassmen had me tagged as IMPACT material. I appreciate their trust, though I hardly deserved it. I remember Shroud taking me to the IMPACT informational meet at FastTrac, racing Go-Karts and wondering if this whole chaplain thing was really me.

I certainly didn't *feel* like a chaplain, and while I knew chaplains don't walk about *feeling* holy all the time, I thought I should be different. They should be examples to others, shouldn't they?

Gump and a few others gave me a few gentle nudges, and at last I applied. I didn't get it, and for a few days was actually disappointed.

Then, one of the chaplains decided that though he wanted to, he just couldn't put in the time for it, and so he resigned. I suddenly had the position.

I was humbled, that was for sure. But God was far from through.

Throughout the year, I put far too little time into the job as I should have. Sure, I showed up to devos every week and led the singing and put up signs (very late, I might add.)

But I became discouraged with the apathy on the floor, something a lot of LETU chaplains deal with. Many people don't show up and just don't care.

The IMPACT selection process for this year came, and I let it slide by. I figured I'd had it with being chaplain, and I didn't want to be one of those IMPACT people, one of those people with the administration's tags on them.

Then, less than two months before the end of the semester, something finally broke though in my brain and I started caring again. God used several people at school to make me see this, Bolt being probably the most prominent, since he was the other chaplain on my floor.

Discipling myself to the level I would truly expect was still far off, but at least I felt that my efforts were worth something, even if it didn't seem that way on Wednesday nights.

Alas, I had already passed the opportunity by to be a chaplain for this upcoming year, but I think God has a purpose here to.

I wouldn't give of my time and my prayers willingly, to help the guys on my floor by being truly and totally faithful in devos. Instead, I just got by, doing what the title of Floor Chaplain made me do.

Now that I've learned my lesson, and at least have a heart to do something about it, God has seen fit to give the job to two other very capable men this next year.

What is He saying to me in this?

"Perhaps, Josh, you've learned your lesson now. But now I'm asking you to live it out, without the exterior title and trappings of a chaplain. I want you to be a chaplain without the name. Can you do that for me?"

And so, I ask that you pray for my struggles to set up habits and attitudes that lend themselves to being a servant, which is a much higher calling than LETU Floor Chaplain.

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In other news, I suppose I mentioned that Bible study Candace and I went to. We go to Indianapolis once a week for a Bible study down there with the college crew of that reformed presbyterian church.

Last night we were in the downstairs area, which consisted of a kitchen that let out into a large, cleared fellowship hall. There was lots of floor space, uncluttered but for one Steinway grand piano.

I don't know if the girls started square/ballroom dancing first, or I started playing first, but somehow both happened and it was a fun 20 minutes or so.

I was maddened that 2 full years of inactivity on the piano had dulled my memory of all but my most fundamental repertoire, so I ended up improvising something close to Pachelbel's Canon in D.

For someone who studied and loved piano for the time I did, I should be able to sit down and play something other than the Moonlight Sonata from beginning to end! It was truly annoying.

But guitar is much fun and improvising just sounds better on it. ;)