A feeling of spring

Friends and Family,

This week I had a wonderful conversation over dinner with a friend of mine, named Hongmei, who is native to Qingdao, China. I met her through IFI; she is a respiratory doctor in China and is at OSU as a visiting scholar doing research. She is not a Christian, but is interested and impressed with Christianity which is why she has been attending the potlucks on Friday nights. We got together at the cafe in the RPAC and had dinner and talked about ourselves and about Qingdao. She is very nice and has said she would love to have me visit her family while I’m in Qingdao, and she wants to take me around and show me the sights!

I had my first Math midterm this week and, Praise the Lord, it went very well. I have three more midterms, but fortunately they are spread out over the next week and a bit. I think my Arabic midterm will not be too bad, though I have a skit to present on Monday as my oral midterm. I’m doing it with a girl in my class named Natalie. Her parents are from the middle east, but she was born and raised in the U.S. (so no accent). She is not muslim. We had a great time practicing, and I’m glad we could do this together and get to know each other better.

The weather here as been swinging back and forth all week. It will go from 6 degrees, to about 30 and snowing, to 50 and sunny, all in the same day. And then it swings back again then next day. I don’t really mind, and I’m always happy when it snows. It was very nice to see the sun on Friday though. I got to walk back to my dorm in the evening sun and I just wanted to close my eyes and stand there, soaking up the joy and happiness that a few rays of sun on a cloudy day can bring you.

Thursday and Friday are mostly my busiest days because I have Arabic club, Arabic club council meeting, and two Arabic conversation tables. All very fun, and very good practice for my Arabic. We are finally registered as an official OSU student club, but we are still trying to drag it off the ground and really get some good stuff going. I would be grateful for your prayer that we would get some good ideas and be able to work together to learn and make a difference. Part of the problem is that everyone is so busy, for many people the club just isn’t important enough, so we need to find things that will make it important.

I finally signed up online for the Washington Post, and hopefully I’ll get around to the New York Times one of these days. When I was at home dad printed out articles for me to read and I could listen to the radio. But here I never have the opportunity to listen to the radio, and dad *grrr* doesn’t seem to want to e-mail me the links to the interesting articles he always reads. He gets a lot of news from a website called Opinion Journal, which I believe is a much more conservative source of news, and so I probably need to read their stuff as well to balance out my liberal news intake from the Washington Post and New York Times. But anyway, the New York Times e-mails me the links to the daily headlines and some other stuff so when I get up in the morning and can just do a quick click from my e-mail inbox, speed read for 5-10 min. and be slightly more informed about the world than I was 10 minutes before (albeit from a noticeably liberal point of view).

Spring is coming, I could smell it the other day when I was walking to class. I know it seems early, but I heard some sparrows tweeting and it just smelled like things were reawakening. I don’t realize how much I miss my farm and being out in the countryside until I hear birds sing, or feel the green grass or finger the bark of a tree. In my busy life at college, my brain is so filled up with school it doesn’t have time to miss the beauty of the country, until there is a few moments when my mind is at rest and then it strikes me at how ugly and hard the city is. I can definitely tell that there is a huge difference between green things in general, of which there are many on campus, and wilderness or farm land where everything is green (that is living as opposed to concrete). But I suppose I’ll just enjoy whatever surrounding God gives me for the present, and maybe I’ll be out climbing trees when spring comes along (though i’ll probably get in trouble).

Have a good week, love you all.

In Christ

Lydia

“No sacrifice, no victory” — Sam Witwicky

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