Statistically, posts started in the middle of retreats have had a low submit-rate, so we'll see how this goes. Also, it's only been three days, and I haven't been especially active for coming up with new thoughts. So, I hope for your sake this is a shorter post, or well, I might suggest reading a word, rolling a die, skipping that many words, and repeating, so as to ingest some more entertaining sentences. I'll even let you call it reading between the lines.

Thursday had one of the best math 331 lectures so far. Differential equations has some of the most beautiful math -- things that just pan out and work in ways you'd hope they would, but never would expect they would. You have a linear combination of vectors and one is obviously an eigenvector unless it's the zero vector, but when it is the zero vector, the other one is forced into eigendome. (Some are born eigen, some achieve eigendome, and some have eigendome thrust upon them -- but only when there's a duplicate eigenvalue.) I'm so glad I didn't have to figure that out, though. Coming up with this stuff would be so difficult, because none of it is obvious.

I switched jackets that day because it was pretty nice out, and inevitably, when that happens, I forget to transfer my keys. Gaul loaned me his with the promise that I'd be in the room when he got back. As I was walking out of Bondage Hall, Jeff texted me, asking if we wanted to meet for lunch, so I about-faced and headed to Vendor's Row, where he bought me a hot dog. We sat at the fountain in Red Square and talked a bit. CCF had an "I'm Sorry" campaign going on, where a lot of us wore horrendously blue shirts with the white lettering: "I'M SORRY". The point of the shirts was to get people to ask about them, and to that extent, the shirts were quite successful. What we were sorry for was for misrepresenting Christ -- on a personal level and as the church as a whole throughout history. A lot of people have been offended by people of the church for various reasons, most of which were because they were acting apart from the way Christ would. I just can't see someone who valued life so much bombing abortion clinics or leading the crusades. Nor could I see someone who cared about people so much, so selflessly, making fun of people in a cruel, mocking way. I know I've done it, and I really am sorry for it. I also need to continue working on it, because I still do it. So, Jeff and I talked about that a bit. I got mixed responses to the shirts. Gaul, I don't think, thought they were a good idea, arguing that we ought to apologize to Christ, not to other people. I think an apology is needed on both accounts, and certainly if it was to have a positive effect on the people, it had better be genuine, and had better succeed an apology to Christ, repentance. A couple people in my math class asked, and they said it was a good idea: "That's really cool." For the four days the campaign ran, we all changed our Facebook profile picture to an image of the shirt, so Curly, who has always hated religion, and I get the feeling he especially dislikes Christianity, took the image and replaced the text with "Actions speak louder than words". That response really bothered me. Part of me thinks he's right, but another part of me thinks what we were doing was an action. People can't know we're sorry unless we tell them, right? Marvel disagreed with it on the basis that he felt we were trying to do a mass outreach to a bunch of diverse people, rather than a single community, where those things usually do well -- that to reach Western, it has to be on a personal basis through relationships. Bob said every time he saw the shirt, he wanted to go up to them and say "You're forgiven." To that, I thought, Oh good, thank you. Will you go to church with me then? Donna said she heard more negative responses than positive ones from people talking about the shirts. Bill and Tonics each said they wanted a shirt, and Bill bought one (I don't know if Tonics got the chance). Still another response, Hime's friend Socks (which is her cat, Socrates's, nickname), who joins us at Hime's house on Thursday nights (so this response was actually after the conversation with Jeff) thought it was the greatest act of the church since feeding the five thousand. Further, she's the person I know that has the most reason to be angry with the church, having been literally abused by deranged people in the name of Christ. From that, Jeff and I talked a bit about other campus ministries. We discussed the Genocide campaign that was in Red Square a week or two ago. Apparently the first day that they started, we had a second grade field trip on campus. Great guys, well done. The thing that bothers me most about it is that abortion isn't even genocide! We're not targeting a race unless you make the profound argument from the other point of view that abortions typically occur among the lower class citizens, who are still typically not white people -- but they would never argue that. No, they've decided to redefine genocide to mean targeting a group of people, and they consider unborn children a group of people, but that neglects the "genos" prefix. It's really pedocide or maybe there's a baby equivalent prefix -cide. So, that's not a ministry, but we discussed it in light of doing something of a similar style with an entirely different view (though not pro-choice). The issue is that it comes off as mocking, and well, things fall apart after that.

I went home after talking with Jeff, and got there a good ten minutes before Gaul got back. He never has to know. Programming Workshop was ridiculously easy this week. I guess he got enough complaints about the NP-Complete problems, he thought he'd hit the other side of the spectrum. Also, five minutes into class (he still hadn't posted the problem), one of the students went to see him and make sure he remembered. He said, "I'm on my way to lunch." The guy asked if he had posted it yet, and he said, "I'm going to go post it and go to lunch." Good game, Professor Hearne, good game. The assignment was to count the number of carries that occur in the addition of two unsigned integers. Bob was going to write the code for this one, but I knew it would be pretty short, and I knew how to do it fast, so I decided to race him. When I was halfway done with my copy, Visual Studio loaded on his computer. Yay vim. After comments, my program was 36 lines of code. The site we usually check our answers against is broken, though, so we just turned in a couple test cases. On the way to turning it in, we found Perry in Clauson's office, and asked if he could think of any faster way than just checking digit by digit, which he couldn't. He asked us if we'd ever figured out the cups problem from three weeks ago, which we hadn't, but Clauson got interested in it, so I explained the problem to him, while Bob turned in our assignment. Clauson came up with a reasonable solution within about 15 minutes (which surprised me) but in the worst case, was just as bad as brute force. (You might skip this part.) The worst case input for his algorithm was three vectors in Z³, each with one non-zero number, where all three numbers were relatively prime to each other. The obvious answer, given {v₁ = <a,0,0>, v₂ = <0,b,0>, v₃ = <0,0,c>} is {bcv₁, acv₂, abv₃} which you could do O(1), but obviously doesn't work for other cases. I may have just figured out the answer. I will get back to you. At any rate, I respect Clauson as a CS professor more now than I had previously. I've never had him, and never really met him, but he's taught a bunch of my non-CS friends in low level GURs and none of them had good things to say.

On Friday, yesterday, Gaul missed our math class because he had another test he had to prepare for. He didn't miss a lot, mostly more of the same, but still some interesting math. Seriously guys, Differential Equations is beautiful. You have these basic straight line solutions that work in most cases, and then there's a bunch of exceptions, but each of them have an equally beautiful solution, and you can usually tell even more about them than with the original.

Around 4:20, David picked me up with Will and a girl whose name I really should know, but can't remember, for the INN's Spring Retreat. She seems cool though. I've seen Will's name around a lot. We have about six hundred and three mutual friends on Facebook from both the INN and CCF. He wants to be a librarian; I'm proud I've yet to enter our library. Still, aside from that, I feel like I can really relate to him, in just our mannerisms and trains of thought. He was also my small group leader during the retreat, so I got to know him a bit from that as well as the car ride. I hope to get to know him better in the coming weeks, these last few weeks of school.

It's been really sad to think I'll be missing all these people in a month. I'll be able to visit and such, but it's not the same. I guess we'll see what happens.

Speaking of visiting campus, my mom has suggested that rather than buying the car I want, I should get a really cheap car I can pay cash for now, until I have saved enough money for the car I actually want, and then pay cash for that. First, paying with cash usually will get you more off the sticker price. Second, you're not paying any interest. Third, you can put the money you got from selling the first car towards a third car, because inevitably, cars die. It's kind of hokey, but she said I should pay myself a "car payment" each month, but rather than sending that check to someone charging me interest, it's money toward a newer car later. It makes sense to me. I guess the environment will have to wait for my pay checks.

The drive up was nearly worth the cost of the trip. I don't usually appreciate nature, but the mountains and the clear sky and the snow and rivers... I don't really know how to describe them other than awe-inspiring. Hallelujah, glory be to our great God. We are so blessed to live in Washington.

Around 12:30 this morning, I quit typing for the night. All relative dates so far ought to be pushed back once. The cup-problem solution I thought I'd come up with did not work, and I remembered the girl's name to be Melissa, though of course it really isn't because that's an alias. Carry on.

On Friday night, Chris spoke about the word "missional," and how Christ lived missionally. (How does missional pass spell check and missionally not?) Basically, it boiled down to one verse in John 1 that I've come to like a lot:

The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only [Son], who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

Grace and truth. After the talk, we split into our small groups. Lulu joined ours. Will posed the questions on the sheet he'd been given to our group and we discussed them. The last question was something about why focusing on grace and truth matters in our lives. Lulu thought about it a second and then said, "Because nothing else matters." I think she's absolutely right.

After a snack and game time, there was a dance. Like with all dances, I didn't really participate, but I talked with Chris a bit. He was the one that got me to go on the trip in the first place, and it was good to get to know him a bit better. He looks quite a bit like Jeff, and I used to get them mixed up, as well as his predecessor, Lance. It turns out Chris and I are alike, at least with dances. It's just not our thing. We also enjoy knowing what various file extension acronyms mean. XNA is not acronymed! At some point during the dance, Minnie, Catie, and Donna wanted to play Hearts. Donna talked herself up, and asked if I was ready to lose. "I was born ready!" We only played one round, before they wanted to dance again. Catie had 0; I had 5; Minnie had 6; Donna had 15. Alas, I did not lose, at least not to her.

On a side note, things between her and me were really great this weekend. I'm not interested in her that way anymore, and I think that's probably the reason it was so fun. It's nice that it worked out -- I've had it happen where things were good, I started to like her, and after that ended, things were still really awkward -- but it'd be nicer if it could be fun with a girl AND we were interested in each other. All the same, I'm quite content with the way things are between me and her.

The next morning, we got up at five to seven for breakfast. The vast majority of us went from there to the top of a stretch of river, where we put on wet suits and booties with holes in them, got in groups of seven, were assigned a guide, and got in rafts. Bridget and I were among the last picked, and had a group of two, so all the groups of eight dropped a person to join ours. Chris, Joe, Michael, Karen, and Dustin joined our crew. Junkyard Dave was our guide. I'm so very glad he was, too, because I didn't like what I saw of any of the other guides, whereas this guy seemed to be pretty laid back, but still knew what he was doing. Also, it turned out we had a pretty amazing crew because none of us left the boat unintentionally, and I think we're the only raft to be able to say that. Then again, our guide fell out. I find that kind of ironic, but in that hour or so before he fell out, we'd been trained well, and we did just fine in the biggest section of rapids without him. In all, it was a great time. Rafting isn't one of those sports I could revolve my life around, but I certainly wouldn't pass up the opportunity to go (unless there were external circumstances, as was the case with this weekend), which has been my opinion all along. At the beginning, all the groups were pretty ornery and Joe threw water on several with the bucket, which was stolen when we had to walk our rafts around a dam, and reclaimed at lunch time. After lunch, though, no one seemed too ready to pick a fight. We were just enjoying the ride. In the second section of rapids, Rock and Roll, there was one particular rock our guide called "Satan's Eye," which I heard later was a euphemism because we were a church group for "Satan's Ass." Dave was telling us about it a little bit before we got to the rapids, saying we should try and stay left of it. Not really knowing what we were trying to stay left of -- it all looked like fast moving, hilly water to us -- we went right over it. It was probably among my top two favorite parts, tied with the entire section in which Dave fell out halfway through. There was another part that some of the groups avoided, but he was confident in our paddling abilities so we followed the group in front of us right into it. We got about halfway over it, and it tried to suck us back down into it. I literally could not push my paddle backward because the current was so strong (plus I'm not exactly made of arm muscle). After what felt like a minute of battling, we did succeed, and that felt good. The whole while, Bridget was pointing out Osprey and their nests. I get the feeling she likes birds as much as Hime likes fish. She said it annoyed some of her crew when she went on the trip last year, but it didn't bother me, nor the rest of the group I think. She's another person I'd like to get to know in the coming weeks.

After we got back, there was quite a bit of free time, in which I started writing this post. Around 4, Jeff and another intern gathered two guys and myself for a little workshop where we discussed James 1. It was a good discussion. One verse in particular stuck out to me (and the preceding two for some context), James 1:6-8:

⁶But when you ask, you must believe and not doubt, because the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind. ⁷Those who doubt should not think they will receive anything from the Lord; ⁸they are double-minded and unstable in all they do.

I feel like I do that a lot. These verses are about asking God for wisdom. I think I ask God for help deciding what to do in various situations but don't actually expect to solid response, and then just go off of whatever "wisdom" I already had, which tends to be none. "They are double-minded and unstable in all they do." That kind of reminds me of my last post, don't you think? Anyway, I prayed this time expecting, or forcing myself to expect an answer, and I think I got one. I feel a whole lot more at peace with things, particularly regarding girls.

For those of you who don't know, which I guess now that I've started a new blog, and most of my readers of my old one have quit reading anyway, is most of you, I have this kind of internal dialogue that goes on in my head. My thoughts sound audible to me, and "I" don't make them all. In 9th grade, I scared my mom by telling her I heard voices. I pretty much knew I wasn't schizophrenic, but I didn't know if this dialogue was normal or not, all the same. So, it turns out I'm not crazy. Good news that, especially since you've devoted your life to reading my blog, it seems, if you've made it this far. Anyway, there are typically two "other voices." Originally there was just me and the other, the one I "talked" to. If I was replaying a conversation in my head, I was me, and the other was whoever I was talking to. As this relationship developed, whenever I debated something in my head, such as whether to do something or not, or how to proceed in some situation, that voice always took the high ground, the right answer, the way I know I should do it, and typically the hard way. Soon, another voice entered the picture that did exactly the opposite. It didn't tell me what I should do, so much as it would play devil's advocate to whatever I thought was right. Often, the two voices would play out as a debate against each other while I sat back a "listened." Of course, they're all my thoughts. I'm thinking everything they "say," but this just seems to be the way I've organized my thought process. What's weird though, is that I don't actually have to "say" a thought aloud in my head to think it. The "audible" part is the echo of the thought, so I'm thinking everything at least twice. Where was I going with this?

Oh right. One of the things the Obi-wan voice ("I've got the high ground!") seems to like to say is, "Don't you see?" Somehow it knows when I'm missing the point entirely and dwelling on the little things that don't matter compared to overarching theme. After I prayed that prayer, it said, "Now you see."

While on the topic, Ella went on the retreat, too. She and I talked a little bit here and there, but nothing on the scale that we first talked with online or when we watched the Incredibles. A couple times I think she glanced at me when she thought I wasn't looking. But then, that's because I wasn't looking and could only see her out of the corner of my eye, so she may have been looking at something else entirely. Anyway, since praying that prayer I've kind of felt like she's too hard to read to bother devoting much thought to in the arena of potential relationships. I still think about her as a friend and such, like I do with Swood, Hime, Gaul, Minnie, and whoever else, and I might still be interested, but in the meantime, I think I'll just let whatever happens happen. Also, from time to time, though my focus was typically on whatever I was doing at the moment (which was more often than not on this trip, thinking about God), I still thought about Rosa, though she was back in Bellingham studying for her two tests tomorrow.

At dinner I discussed what the workshop thing was about with Chris. It turns out that the staff and interns had discussed the same passage, and it sounds like, talked about a lot of the same questions. One he asked me was, "Is it okay to doubt?" We'd discussed that very question at length in our group. I basically came to the conclusion that there's a difference between doubt and vetting. With a child-like faith, we need to be asking "why?" We need the scientific method, in a sense, and I wouldn't consider that doubt.

That night, Lulu talked about the word 'evangelism' and what that means. First, she took a white board and got us to shout out ideas that come to mind when that word is used. A good ninety percent of them were negative. We, as the church, have failed in so many ways to evangelize. We've just gone about it wrong, I think. She then discussed what it meant when Jesus gave the Great Commission in Matthew 28:

¹⁶Then the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go. ¹⁷When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted. ¹⁸Then Jesus came to them and said, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. ¹⁹Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, ²⁰and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age."

This year she has always managed to come at a passage I'm well acquainted with from a different angle. In verse 16, it says "the eleven disciples." Twelve was how many there were before and it was a complete number and well organized. Eleven is not a very nice number. For one, it's prime. But it also has this sense of jumbledness to it. So this incomplete group goes to Jesus and they're probably pretty shaken up, in fact, it says that some doubted, even when they saw him, were in his presence. Then Jesus stepped closer to them. He didn't back away, like, "How dare you doubt that it's me?" or "Come back when you find your twelfth man." (Lulu was proud that she could throw in a football reference.) He stepped forward and encouraged them. He orderd them to go. He charged these eleven ordinary guys to go and make disciples of all nations. The word disciple there means learner or student. He doesn't say, "Go out and convert people to me," or "Go out and scare people away from hell," or "I want numbers!" He says, "Go talk about this thing I've done for you. Go get people interested. Go be academic about it. Go discuss." When it's put that way, evangelism seems so much better. It's not pushy. It doesn't need to be apologized for. And then he says, "No stress." We can't convert anyone. We can't make people Christians. That's the Spirit's job. Our job is to talk and to serve, and that's really it. Talk and serve, truth and grace.

After our small groups discussed Lulu's talk, we had some more free time. I found myself teaching five girls how to play Idiot, though several of them had played variations of it, with two decks. Throwing down 6 sevens certain changes the game a bit. A couple rounds in, someone suggested Signs, which I'd been hoping to get some people to play the whole trip. We didn't get to play long before Sabbath, but fun was still had, and Donna learned a new game.

Sabbath had the best set of songs I've sung in a while. Every song was one of my favorites.

This morning, we got up for a 9am brunch. Then Jim gave a message. I was pretty distracted and regrettably don't remember very much of it. After our small group discussion of it, we packed, cleaned, grabbed a sack lunch, and left. Melissa and I slept for quite a while in the back of the car on the way back. It must have been quite a while, because the trip felt like half the time. Maybe it actually was half the time, somehow. It took four to five hours to get there, and about three to get back, I think. Weird. It was pretty much dead silent the whole time, except for the iPod playing through the speakers. I think we're all tired.

That about brings us to now, where I'm frustrated. During some free time last night, I had been talking to Ella a little bit. One of the girls in my small group apparently knew Ella pretty well and came and sat between us. I was in the conversation, but I didn't say a whole lot. Ella's birthday is on Tuesday, and the girl asked what she was going to do, to which Ella said she'd want to do something on Thursday. Then she sort of waved her hands in the table's direction, and specifically at me, I think, and said, "Everyone here is invited." I somewhat got the feeling that she invited me because she didn't want to hurt my feelings, but I don't know that for sure. I'm terrible at reading people, particularly girls I hold some interest in. I knew there'd probably be a facebook event, but I didn't expect to get invited, at least not if she only meant it as a gesture. But, while writing this post, I did get an invitation from her via facebook. Her friend had created the event and she invited me to it, I suspect along with a bunch of other people, but facebook doesn't allow that thorough of stalking. I told Hime about it, and she said I shouldn't go because she thinks she only invited me to keep from hurting my feelings. I don't know either way. In the moment, that's how it seemed. Objectively, that's not how it seems, not to me (which makes it subjective). At any rate, I want to go if she wants me to go, but I have no way of figuring that out. I think what annoys me most, though, is the system. The position I'm in shouldn't exist in the first place. People should say what they mean, and avoid dancing this dance. For the record, I'd be annoyed were I in this position with anyone, or, at least any girl; guys don't put guys into this position, nor do they often care who shows up to their birthday party.

Well, I've successfully avoided yet another full night's sleep. I didn't even get to watch a movie, play Kotor2, or read any more of either of the books I'm reading.