Fellowship

Today, I was invited to a welcome party/concert that IVCF Mt. Hope was throwing to invite all of their freshman students. Let me just quickly define two terms in the above sentence. IVCF stands for “Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship”, which is a local arm of an international organization which helps Christian youths in college to meet others of the same belief. Their motto is “To know Christ and to make Him known.” If I seem to know a lot about this organization it’s because I’m part of the executive this year as the Bible-Study Coordinator. And Mt. Hope is the a branch of the local university UWI (University of the West Indies) which focuses on the study of medical sciences. Now on to the blog.

The amphitheatre where the event was being held wasn’t very full, and some of the equipment wasn’t working or available, so it started late and some of the stuff had to brought in while to show was going on. It ran into overtime, so by the time it was over, most of the target audience had already left. Some people may have thought that all this would have meant little success for the event. Not for me however. I might as well been sitting in the front row seat of a concert thrown by some “internationally acclaimed” rock star. Everything was awesome. The music, the songs, the spoken word, the icebreaker games…everything was just wonderful.

I guess that the real reason behind my feeling so was the fact that I was with a whole bunch of people who shared the same beliefs and interests with me. We could have been outside in a field with no instruments or speakers and it still would have been awesome. I guess there’s no real substitute for being around people who are just like you. It doesn’t matter whether you’re Christian or not, or if you’re religious at all. There’s a kindred feeling that comes with feeding off of the energy of those around you. If you have the time, you should join the local youth group, or club or sports team, or pretty much whatever interests you. You’d be glad you did.

I’d like to give special shout out the the Mt. Hope IVCF executive. You guys did great in putting on the show. I hope to see more like it in the future! :)

So, till tomorrow guys! Bye!

Perfect Imperfections

To be totally honest, after all the hype of starting my blog yesterday, I was totally terrified that I would have nothing to blog worthy to write about today. So I went to school with eyes wide open for something to blog about.

After a morning of listening to boring lectures and hearing Alyssa, one of my friends, rattle on and on about how awesome Rafael Nadal is (apparently he's the youngest player to complete a career Grandslam. Who knew?), I finally found what I wanted to blog about. And I must say, it came in the most ironic of ways.

We have this course named Engineering Design, which basically where we learn to make stuff. In going the PowerPoint slides on what exactly the course entails, one line kinda jumped out and slapped me in the face. It was a partial definition of the term "Design". It simply read "Design is a combination of art and science." Like I said, it's pretty ironic. Here I am, naming my blog "Artsy Engineering" and the next day I'm confronted with exactly that.

But that's not where the main idea for this post came from. As we moved deeper in to the course, I learned that one of the tenants of Design is compromise. Something may be completely awesome from an aesthetic point of view and completely useless from a scientific one. The same is true the other way around. And so in the end compromise is reached in which both sides balance out. While one may be able to say from either an artistic or engineering point of view the the finished product has several imperfections, one can also say that, being balanced, it's the perfect product.

And that got me thinking. Our world is full of mishaps and flaws. Things that go haywire and crazy at the most inopportune of times. It would seem that God made some serious mistakes in His design. But what if the imperfections that we see are what make our world so perfect? What if the things we see as flaws are really the compromise between art and science? What if we just had sliver linings but no clouds? How would we appreciate them? What would the world be like if there were just clouds but no silver linings? Would we be able to live through it?

So from now on I'm not gonna look for the rainbow after the rain. I'd just be happy that both the rain and the rainbow exist, because that what makes it so sublime. And so, there are never going to be bad moments or good moments anymore. Just perfect moments. And it's because of all these imperfections that our world is so perfect.