Personal Life Update: Short

Just a post to inform that I'm still alive. I've never had such a full schedule before, that I've actually depended on carrying a calendar with me to make sure that I don't miss deadlines for things on any given day. I feel so very 'adult' because of it. It's a different experience, to know exactly just how much time I have--and don't have--to do anything, like studying or blogging, and I think it's helpful to keep me motivated and busy. A side effect is simply that extracurricular activity takes a back seat while I work on keeping abreast with homework assignments, so that I'll still have time to study for exams on top of it.

More to come, just no guarantees on when or where or how much. :)

~Rak Chazak

I haven't died! (PLU)

Not yet, anyway. After my summer course ended, I've been reviewing various subjects from old textbooks I kept (I never resold a single book at college, figuring there could be some value in the information one day). Then, as my Fall textbooks have been arriving, I went to Staples and grabbed some non-spiral notebooks (so they'll lie flat and not have an irritating ridge in the middle), and I've been going through the early chapters, compiling and condensing the stuff I think I won't remember off the top of my head, and making neat, neat notes out of it.

My Organic Chemistry notebook was done the same way, and I was so thorough and explanatory with it that I've been using it to reteach me, to great success. Organic Chemistry 2, which I have not taken, is a required course for a Chemistry Minor, which I'm going to squeeze in to my course of study. See, because I already have a degree, I don't need to pursue the general education requirements which the program left slots open for, so I can pick other courses to take instead. And as it turns out, all that's required for a chemistry minor is to have a minimum number of courses taken at the university, and a certain number having to be upper-level (300-level and above) courses. And that number exactly matches the slots I have available in between my other classes. (The only question is whether Orgo transfers. I graduated with the class but not the lab (wasn't required), but this university has the lab and class together. It could thwart the minor objective; in that case I suppose I could just retake Orgo once again and get an unquestioned A....then I could pursue a biochemistry major part-time when I become duly employed. I kind of want to do it just to show myself that I can, and that my rocky road the first time around was because of non-academic reasons.

On the subject of not having died, I'm still a little bit skeptical of the accuracy of the blood pressure cuffs at the YMCA, but the values they're giving me are pretty consistent. The across-the-board medical consensus on what's healthy is a blood pressure of 120/80. Either number being less is a sign of above-average cardiovascular health, but higher pressure in either number indicates danger signs for heart issues. The lower number, the diastolic pressure, is the one to watch out for. It indicates the elasticity of your arteries--higher pressure, more trans and saturated fats in your cell membranes, ergo, stiffer arterial walls, meaning that the blood pressure can roughen them, exposing underlying collagen, to which platelets react, then dislodging and causing embolisms. Or not dislodging, and causing atherosclerosis.

[Here's an image] -- comparing the two pressures

The higher pressure indicates the strength of the heart--it is when the stethoscope first hears the pulse, which means that that is how much pressure your heart can generate with each contraction. It's essentially an estimate of the strength of your ventricles, which means that an abnormally high systolic pressure can indicate an enlarged heart muscle, for whatever reason. Conversely, the lower this pressure is, provided you're in visibly good health, the less effort your heart has to put in to do its job.

Yesterday morning, I woke up early enough to start a run at 5:20 a.m. I ran three miles at 7:20, 7:55, 9:35 pace, walked one, and then ran another at 8:35. Heart rate was 161 beats per minute after each segment (the 3-mile and 1-mile). That's a good baseline that I'll use to keep track of how well I'm progressing. The more you run, the better your body optimizes and the lower your resting heart rate, aerobic heart rate, systolic and diastolic arterial pressures will be.

So I was thrilled that the electronic cuff measured my pre-workout blood pressure at 110/57. When I get my physical exam later in the month, I'll find out how accurate those cuffs are.

And in the meantime, I'll keep running. Which requires me to go to bed really early. Days I sleep in are my rest days. My body and I have a two-way dialogue when it comes to exercise. :D

~ Rak Chazak

Personal Life Update: A Student

Hooray,

Now that I've received the results for each of my first exams, I'm relieved and a little bit excited to see that I'm safely in the A grade range. Now, I don't have scholarships depending on grades, so I would really only have to get a C or more, which in one of my classes cuts off at 75% (and the A is 93%), in order to get the credit for the course.

Obviously I'm not shooting for the worst allowable performance, but knowing I'm safely far above this removes a lot of the temptation to be stressed out. I have a buffer, and so long as I keep doing well, it'll increase in strength, allowing me to be more and more singularly focused on actually comprehending the material, rather than distracted by concerns about the consequences of missing something important.

I've been in both positions before. In high school, I enjoyed the consistency of the classwork routine; everything stayed fresh in my head and I never fell behind with whatever material I needed to learn. In college, the self-pacing that was necessary was at first difficult to deal with, but toward the end I managed to impose the helpful rigidity on myself, and figured out ways that were effective in mitigating distractions. Now that I'm finished with that degree, my slate of grades is wiped clean, and I can start fresh and be a high achiever once again, both on paper as well as in my inner thought life.

I'm uncertain, but if I'm compared to another student, when it comes to the Uni course I'm gunning for in the Fall, and we have the same standing in terms of our courses, perhaps a better grade in the prerequisites would factor into the computer algorithm and preferentially give me the contested seat in the class.

I feel very content with the trajectory I'm on. I believe the restlessness with my financial and domestic situation will stay with me until I finally attain a 'self-reliant' income and have the freedom to begin making longer-term life plans. I welcome it as a source of continual motivation to not get too relaxed, even when things feel good. There's always work to be done. Whatever I do now is potentially blessing me in the future. No effort is truly wasted. And so I'm seeking to make the best of everything as I keep running this race.


~ Rak Chazak

Personal Life Update: 100-m Hurdling

It doesn't really seem to stop. I quite like the simplicity of not having multiple, overlapping deadlines that require attention every single day, even just to make sure I'm not falling behind on the process of working to meet them. On the other hand, continuous responsibility to keep track of "adult" stuff feels good, because you have external pressures on you that work against any lazy urges that prompt you to sleep in, or waste time eating, playing video games, wasting time on line, etc. It makes you more productive and helps secure a sense of purpose as opposed to a sense of "what did I even do today?"

I'm over a little bit of a hurdle now. I've finally accomplished a grocery-list of financially-related issues that began to appear on my radar around December-January. These include:
1. Apply to community college
2. Apply to the second bachelor's program I'm interested in
3. Pay for CC
4. Buy books for CC
5. Do taxes
6. Do FAFSA (requires step 5)
7. Check with Financial Aid to make sure I crossed my t's and dotted my i's.

And on top of that, the first round of exams, that overlapped for about a week from last Thursday to today, is now past. So I have a bit of a reprieve, now, a sense of completeness with respect to these deadlines.

The next few steps are more natural: wait for Fin-Aid information to come back to me. Go to my classes and ace the examinations as usual, and keep myself from bleeding out too fast by working double shifts on the weekends (I was fortunate enough to be granted that request; now I have undistracted time between Monday morning and Friday afternoon to focus on schoolwork, and non-stop shift employment from Friday evening through Sunday evening). This is more routine and muscle memory than frantic paper-pushing and double-triple-quadruple-checking that I'm not running late for deadlines.

The things that press on me the most are the objectives for which I'm not certain what the deadlines are. The big obvious one that's on the radar now is the final prerequisite for the course I'm gunning for. One of the classes I'm taking now is the prerequisite for that one, so if you're following along with me, that means I need to find somewhere to take the course over the summer. This is somewhat unusual and I don't know what the availability is. As of last month, no colleges around had set their summer schedules yet, so I wasn't able to make any final decisions on where to zero in, let alone apply and register. But that is something I'm hoping to revisit tomorrow and see if there have been any developments.

There are other things I'm thinking about, too, which I won't necessarily discuss on a blog. And I'm trying not to either be distracted from all this by blogging, nor put it off so much that my blog goes defunct. I had a few false starts in the past and I'm quite pleased with how this one has been shaping up. I'm working on my Dekadius workout, as well as hitting the gym 1-3 times a week so I don't lose the progress I'd been making. I'm learning where my limits are, and the shoulder presses, lunges and calf raises have turned out to be a bit more difficult than I anticipated, whereas the pushups feel almost easy, but that can all change as I keep going through this process. The primary goal is to limber up my body, and the secondary goal is to get enough base strength that I can start seriously using weights to train my underused muscles and get some positive body transformation going.

Looking for and thinking about opportunities to share my faith. It has been partly restlessness with my perceived lack of interpersonal interaction with regard to witnessing that motivates me to write on this blog; that way, even when I am doing nothing in person (I don't exactly have a very public life, for that matter), I still have the potential to have an impact for the Gospel among those who search online for the subject matter I touch on, here.

That gives me encouragement as I go along. To God be the glory!

~ Rak Chazak

A Woman Provokes A Thousand Thoughts

May 31 marked the one-year point after moving back home after graduating college with a B.A. in Biology. I mused recently about how long it may be until I would no longer be a “single Christian guy,” and since this date is suitably auspicious, I decided to count 1000 days from June 1. This gets fairly close to my 27^th birthday by the conclusion of the count (which will give me a year until I’m 28, the age I arbitrarily decided when I was 15 or 16 that I should reasonably be able to be married by) . But more than just counting the days to an arbitrary point at which I will let myself begin to stress out if I haven’t found a fiancée, I figured it would be very neat if I could take the time every night to try to generate a concise, unique thought inspired by my mental conception of my future wife, and to post these from time to time as a sort of mini-journal scribbling. Each thought will have something to do with this woman, either in remarking about what appeals or doesn’t appeal to me, or in thinking about how I can prepare myself to be a good partner, or what our relationship would be like. After all, devoting the time to think 1000 thoughts about how to have a good relationship with the right partner is bound to be beneficial; at the very least, it couldn’t hurt, and it will be here for her to read when we’re still making friends—a useful thing in my opinion, since it would help her decide if I’m the kind of guy she wants to marry.

Expect occasional bulk uploads of my AWPATTs; the dates covered will be in the post title.

~ Rak Chazak

AWPATTS:
1-4
5-10
11-19
20-23
24-30
31-40
41-49
50-82
83-88
89-96
97-108
109-200
201-204
205-230 - Special A-Z upload231-247 - marrying younger, and dating advice
248-262
263-320 - comments on approaching dating and evaluating potential partners


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When Open-Air Preaching 'Clicked' for Me

Prologue

I was 11 when I started to take following God's commandments seriously. Not because I was wantonly disobedient before, but merely that the reason I was doing it changed. And to tell you the truth, I can't be completely sure I know the reason. I'm very hesitant to say that I wasn't saved before, lest I blaspheme and profess to say something about God that isn't true. But from a perspective of evaluating myself, I realized as I prayed last night, I don't think I can ever "know" that I was saved before, since the way to really know is to understand the theology of salvation, which I didn't have any incorrect ideas about, to my memory, but I certainly didn't have a complete understanding. So for the simplicity of language's sake, I think I can say that I know I've been saved, since somewhere between the beginning of 2011 and 2012, with confidence. That said,

Wake-up Call

It was even before I know that I was saved that I became "converted" to the belief that open-air preaching was not only useful, but important, and a necessity. I had lived most of my life having a basic understanding of God from whatever I'd gleaned from church and what I got from the books I'd read at my own leisure, which included Genesis, Exodus, Revelation and parts of Daniel. You know, the 'exciting stuff.' And though I had no shame in talking about God with others, as I can easily remember from my time in Boy Scouts, I never had the urge to evangelize--to go out and talk with people with the express intention of trying to explain Christianity to them, and if possible, convince them of its truth. This makes some degree of sense, considering that I didn't yet have the complete picture myself, whether it's the case that I had weak faith or vain faith. But I took for granted that Jesus was God and that the basic points of the Christian faith were totally understood by everyone in America, because of how widespread the influence of christianity is.

My wakeup call came in my second semester of college, when I passed by one of the street preachers. There was one guy who came regularly to my university, and another who traveled more widely and whom I know less about, and came less frequently. It was not the first time I'd seen a crowd gathered in a semi-circle around the speaker, but this time I wasn't in a rush and I took some time to listen. I can't remember to this day what exactly I heard, and I might be conflating several different moments into one, but I remember being utterly shocked at how ignorant the people challenging (heckling) the preacher were of basic Biblical facts. Further, my university had a very high minority population. There were substantial amounts of foreign nationals from Africa, the Middle East and the Orient, as well as students who descend from those regions and had been brought up in that culture in their home, but had grown up in America. One might expect a Saudi national at an American university on a royal scholarship to not be aware of Christian doctrine. But these were white, native-born American kids who couldn't tell right from left when it came to theology. And this was something I understood as soon as I saw it, even long before my 'awakening' in the spring of 2010. I was shocked. Shocked. 

That experience impressed upon me the belief that open-air preaching is an important service, getting the basic facts of the Gospel out there so that people can at least know what it is, in order to make an informed decision about it. Like the Bible says in Romans 10:14, "how can they hear without a preacher?" If it weren't for men like these, the message would be lost over time in the culture, because people simply don't look it up on their own. That is a lie. The only way they'll hear the truth is if someone annoys them with it when and where they don't want to hear it. 

The Preacher and the Preaching

After I began studying the Bible passionately a year later, I began to feel the effects of regeneration, I believe. A strong desire to share the amazing truth that I was learning took hold of me, and my feelings toward the street preacher went from affirmation to thankfulness and encouragement. I introduced myself to the preacher, who served the Mid-Atlantic region for the organization called "Open Air Campaigners." His name was Paul Adams, shown above, and would be very recognizable from a distance with his painting easel and the crowd that typically gathered in the middle of the day. I'm very happy to report that this preacher doesn't live up to his reputation among the students as the angry, loud, offensive bigot he supposedly is. It's funny, the cranks who make such comments confuse other students to the point where they're not sure they're talking about the same person! No, Paul's Gospel presentation is complete (not lacking anything essential), done in love, and just salty enough to not let people's consciences off scot-free. "If only" he didn't speak against people's favorite sins, they wouldn't be offended. But as 1 Corinthians 1:18 and 1 Peter 2:8 together say, "the Gospel is an offense to those who are perishing."

Another year later, after my initial immersion in studying Creation, Biblical Inerrancy, and then Islam, to cover all my theological bases, I had moved on to "meatier," more in-depth Christian theology. Throughout most of 2011, I eventually came to wrap my head around what is commonly called "Calvinism," but which is nothing more than the key parts of the Gospel, clearly emphasized in no uncertain terms. I also began to learn about pseudochristian sects and heresies, and came across the concept of false believers. This was early in the year and happens to coincide with the "P" part of TULIP (an acronym for the points of Calvinism): a video of Ray Comfort preaching on youtube called "true and false conversion." In it he asked  a young man if he "knew the Lord," when he was allegedly a believer. If he answers yes, he admits God exists, if he answers no, he admits he didn't know God. So any unbeliever who claims to have once been a believer, bottom line, never was. And that, I believe, is how I began to watch Way of the Master (Ray's ministry) videos and began watching their On the Box videos fairly regularly.

That was how I got to 'meet' the guys involved in their ministry, which at the time also included Tony Miano, who is now a freelancing preacher as well. I just wanted to bring this up to make the teensy-tiny observation that I think Tony and Paul are alike in a few ways. They:

* are sponsored by (and rooted in) the church they worship in to go out and preach

* have a similar testimony, in that they came to faith when they were a bit older. Paul was in the Marines(? if it was the Army, my mistake) and Tony was a Roman Catholic, but I'm not sure if they overlap here necessarily. But both were 'tough guys' whose regeneration produced highly noticeable changes in their character. 

* used to have a history of shouting and sounding angry, from which they've changed and now if you'd hear their typical open-air, they're some of the calmest, kindest, least-wrathful-sounding people there--the hecklers are the nasty ones.

I had a funny thought. That last bit made me think of Vulcans. From Star Trek--do you know that they had a reputation for always being highly in control of their emotions and never seemingly getting angry? But if I remember the backstory, Vulcans behaved that way because they were inherently VERY aggressive and angry people, and learned to 'stuff' their outbursts deep down over time and focus on logic over emotion. This isn't to imply that these guys are bursting with rage on the inside, haha! Just that from an observer's standpoint, they can take disrespect and aggressiveness from others with extreme calm and not return kind for kind. You can really see that particular fruit of the Spirit in each of them when they're in action.

It's from watching videos of Tony (and Ray Comfort and Todd Friel) online and from seeing Paul in person that I've come to believe from personal experience that open-air preaching, combined with tracting and the use of internet sites as tools to amplify your ability to reach people, is and is going to be the most effective way to evangelize the nation we live in. The mission field isn't in Africa. It's down the road from where you live, in America. It's time to hit the streets.

Some pictures of Paul preaching

 Heckler front and center

 A wide assortment of people turn out, gather around, and at the very least hear the Good News.

If you don't believe it works, then when you see the crowd it draws, and hear the questions that are asked, and the answers that are given, I almost guarantee you'll change your mind.

~ Rak Chazak

Victory! Finals Have Been Defeated!

I haven't felt quite this strange in a long time. It's weird when you conclude a sequence of predefined challenges and now suddenly have to figure out what ladder you're going to climb next. It was a little bit less of a "huh..what now?" feeling after high school graduation, because I had already been accepted into college, so that was where I was going, no need to think about it. But now after graduation, I'm not immediately designated for going anywhere in particular. 

Let's put a positive spin on this.

Rather than to look at it as if I'm ambling around without a sense of direction or purpose, I choose to think of myself and my future as being omnidirectional. 'Omni' means "every," and so now that I have nowhere I have to go, and nothing I have to do (exception being to find a way to get money, and soon), I have a potentially unlimited pool of possibilities in front of me. It's as if all doors are open, and which ones close and which ones open after this will depend on the choices I make as I go from here. I'll only have one actual future, but at the moment I have multiple potential futures, and on some level, I have the freedom to choose which I prefer.

That's nice, but the irony is that I don't really know what I'd prefer. I mean, my long-term goals are as concrete as they could be -- move to a mountainous state, try homesteading, get married, etc etc, but my near-medium-term goals are an amorphous haze. My ability to make decisions about my future is hindered by my inability to predict the future. I don't know what will end up happening in the next few months, or year, and this obscures the future in my mind. It's very hard to make plans when your life isn't stable. And by unstable I simply mean that it's rapidly changing in a way I can't foresee. 

I'm going to have to take things day by day for the time being, and not by choice. My biggest motivation, then, to go looking for employment, is the privilege to plan ahead and determine my own future that that would give me. Because to this date, my life has been largely determined by a preset schedule. In early life, my parents raised me and taught me to speak; in my youth I simply went through primary and secondary public school like everyone else; and in my young adult life I've gone to college and wrapped up a degree. There hasn't been a lot of input from my end. My decisions have been similar to the whitewater rafter's decisions about which way to move laterally along a river. The river keeps pushing you downstream no matter what you do. Going upstream is not within your sphere of choice, nor is disembarking at key moments. But now my raft has come to a calm part of the river and I have a choice which bank to row towards. While I'm still in the raft, I can survey the shore and the horizon from a distance and make a commitment before I begin climbing, because when I'm on my way up, I might not be able to see the forest for the trees, as the saying goes. To conclude my analogy, then, unfortunately for me, a fog hangs over the valley and I can't see what the terrain ahead or to the sides looks like. I'm going to have to make a blind decision. In this case, with the current pushing further ahead slowly but steadily, even indecision is blind.

There's the mountain I want to climb, but I can't see how I get there.

(Credit:Stephen Alvarez http://alvarezphotography.com)

Here's to all the other college graduates out there and my best wishes to you. It's my hope that you will make the best decisions, even if, like me, you can't see where you're walking. My desire is that we will look back in time and see where we've come from and cherish the trail as much as the summit.

~ Rak Chazak

What To Expect If You Are An Outspoken Christian Public University Student

I'm going to start this off on a happy note, with some wise words by the 'Prince of Preachers':

“Discernment is not simply telling the difference between what is right and wrong; rather, it is telling the difference between right and almost right." ~ C H Spurgeon

And end on a more somber note. I often tell myself, to ensure that I maintain a proper perspective, that I really have it good, here in America. I have never been at want for food, clothes, a place to live or enough money--thanks to my hardworking parents--to keep me in school until I've seen it finished. And as a Christian, I've never faced true persecution. Opposition, maybe. But I have lived my whole life without being treated unjustly by society-at-large, or someone in a position of great authority, because of my Christian faith.

That's why the email I received from a faculty member at my university made me pause and consider that maybe, in a small sense, I'd just gotten a tiny taste of what persecution is like. I say tiny, because I still have freedom of movement, freedom of speech, freedom to engage in the  economy (you don't have that if you're a Christian Dhimmi, or second-class citizen, in an Islamic country), and I don't fear for my life, like they do in Nigeria, for example.

It's weird, when you realize that you just got treated with disregard simply because of your beliefs. At least the first time it happens. You know to expect it, but it's strange nonetheless -- there's just something about it that feels like it isn't a "normal" sort of dislike...which I would of course chalk up to the spiritual nature of the war we're fighting.

I won't say what university, or what State I'm in, but I live in the region that I would consider the Mid-Atlantic Region of the United States. My university has an online discussion-forum where students can debate things if they wish. It is non-anonymous--our names are attached to our posts. I was the only outspoken Christian, who consistently used Biblical arguments and logical reasoning to justify my positions on various political issues that would be brought up. I never considered -- and here I was naive to not do so -- that some students would seek to go after me personally in order to intimidate me out of sharing my beliefs. Well, they don't know me very well. I don't fear man. But what I didn't realize was that my enemies (it's fair to call them that) were engaging in a rumor campaign to poison public opinion against me. It sounds extreme, and a bit ridiculous -- but sinful men will stop at no lengths to justify their rebellion against their Creator, and as a consequence, they will stop at no length to attack that which reminds them that God is in authority over them. Namely, you. There's nothing they won't do to shut you up. Presently they will use intimidation and seek to use the justice system or public opinion to silence you; but if they had the motive and opportunity, they would gladly kill you for your witness. I don't know how long that day is from today, here in America. I won't speculate. But I will say that the hatred I've seen in college students toward God and toward those that preach Christ causes me to be utterly convinced that, given the right cultural climate, the God-haters will easily escalate angry words into murder. Christ said that he who hates his brother is a murderer. I believe it. Those who hate you secretly want you dead. All that prevents that from being a reality is the restraining ministry of the Holy Spirit that holds them back from acting on their sinful desires.

Okay, on to the conclusion of the story. I went to a professor that I had had, and asked him for a letter of recommendation so that I could apply to internships (which required you to turn in two recommendations for your application to be considered). He agreed, at first. Then he sent me an email saying that he had mentioned my name to someone else, and they had told him I'd said "inflammatory" things on the university discussion site. I explained myself to him in a second email. Here is an excerpt of his response:

        Much more significantly my unenthusiastic recommendation will be more readily apparent to any reader for its sterility because they will read between the lines.  I, and most recommenders, would strive to make supporting comments that the student would make a welcome addition to any lab and that their career in science is promising.  I can't offer that for you.  Homophobes and proselytes are not welcome in any lab, or any workplace that I know of, and strict believers in the bible are anti-science.

        "The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also." -Mark Twain

        I can write a recommendation letter, Hakam, but it's probably not one that would advance your chances.  Perhaps your true vocation is in the clergy or as a missionary?  You have faith ... that's great for you. But for those of us in science faith is not enough.

Are the universities tolerant of Christianity? This professor wasn't. A word of advice to Christian parents; think carefully about whether you send your child to a public university. If they go, they'll need to be more skilled than I was at not stirring up the hornets' nest. I would further recommend this online book, which gives advice for how to 'survive' college as a Christian: Fish Out of Water

This email is very real. It reveals the very real animosity that exists toward Christians in the scientific fields at public research universities in the United States.

This is far from open persecution. But it's a part of the cultural attitude that will eventually rationalize the "implementation" of oppressive legal restrictions on Christians unless a miraculous revival were to take place and turn back this country from the brink.

Not to sow fear or anything. 

~ Rak Chazak