Dear friends and family,
Despite my better judgment, I’m going to write an update this week because so many cool things have happened. Most important and wonderfully exciting is we had a blizzard here in Columbus!!! It started snowing Friday morning, kept going through to Friday night, and by Saturday morning it was blizzarding and it didn’t really stop until Saturday evening. I can’t say what the average snow fall is or anything, but around my dorm it ranges between a foot and a foot and a half deep. The wind was blowing pretty hard the whole time, so the snow got moved around quite a bit.
Snow is so much fun!! and this is the first time I’ve been in so much snow (excluding a big snow we had when I was about 5 which I don’t remember very well). Friday evening I spent an hour sliding down a steep pathway, very very fun, and later that evening after my usual IFI potluck, a few other international students and I went and had a snowball fight. For most of them, this was the first time they had ever been in snow, much less had a snowball fight!
Then on Saturday morning, I purposefully went out in the blizzard to play and it was sooo much fun. Snow makes everything beautiful, and I was playing around the south oval where mirror lake is. This little valley is very pretty and has a bunch of trees. I was jumping in snow drifts that just about buried me, sliding down railings and the falling off into the snow, getting under tree branches and shaking all the snow off on my head, and basically being a kid ;)> I also spotted the ducks while I was down there and they were very unhappy to say the least. I got the impression that they were thinking “This isn’t what I signed up for when I decided to become an OSU duck, I thought the contract said ‘minimal snow’….grumble grumble quack quack”
In other exciting news, the IFI potluck this Friday was very special because we had a very important guest. Her name was Deborah Cheng (she’s Chinese) and she is the inventor of smart concrete, among other things. If you don’t know what that is, look it up. Basically she is an amazing scientist with a Ph. D. from MIT and she is also a concert pianist. And, she’s a Christian. She came to give us a presentation called “Science, Music, and Life.” She basically told us about her life and how she got to where she is now and used it to witness to God’s glory in all that he has helped her do. It was very interesting and I was very humbled by her witness while thinking about my own ongoing life as a college student in the midst of a secular environment.
On Thursday night I went to an OSU sponsored event that invited Alberto Gonzales, the former U.S. Attorney General, to come speak. I really enjoyed listening to him and was very encouraged by the views and values he seems to hold. Unfortunately, not everybody liked him as much as I did. There were quite a few protesters there who were very disruptive and sometimes I couldn’t hear what Gonzales was saying because the protesters were yelling. It didn’t get too bad or anything, because there were policemen and guards there who would remove protesters who were particularly loud and disruptive. And they did remove quite a few. Apparently, Gonzales has supported some kind of laws or provisions that allowed some kinds of torture in interrogation ( waterboarding, cold temperatures and face slapping), and therefore a bunch of the protesters were yelling at him for that. I certainly stand up for their right to protest, but it would have been nice if they had done it in a different way such that they respected the fact that he was trying to give a speech and his audience couldn’t hear him when they were yelling at him. Oh well.
Ok, those are the major exciting things that happened. I heard that you got quite a bit of snow in Shelbyville/Louisville as well and I hope everybody stays safe and warm. Please pray for me during this week of finals. I have one each on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. I don’t think they should be too hard, but I only if I study a whole lot. Take care and God bless.
In Christ
Lydia