If the protracted silence proceeding from this blog hasn’t made you give up hope forever, mayhap this post will come to you like rain in the midst of the desert, but perhaps more likely like rain after the sky has been ominous all day, and you hoped beyond hope it wouldn’t crack.

Doug: Wait! I’ve got a great story you should hear.
Max: AAAAAACCCCCHHHHHHH!
Sam: Keep it short, kid. My partner’s got a low tolerance for long stories.

So, what’s been happening to me?

First of all, as a follow on from my previous course. I know what and where I want to study. It must be a miracle. I said it would have to be in my last post, and I’m not going to swallow those words now.

I visited Oxford, and I was so thankful, because it was the most beautiful city I’d ever been to, and both me and Emma wanted to go there, it felt perfect. I was particularly interested in Magdalen College. This is the same college as CS Lewis went to. It has the most beautiful garden I’ve ever seen, and a deer lawn, and that really does it for me.

Perhaps that’s where I’ll go, but I really don’t expect it will be. Ignoring for now my results, let me tell you about Cambridge.

Cambridge’s Engineering presentation really inspired me. So much so that I’d say that even if I never go there, the inspiration was absolutely invaluable. I fell in love with Oxford city, but as for the engineering course, I’ll have to say Cambridge’s course was much more inspiring.

The impression I got at Oxford was that engineering was something they did extremely well, but it wasn’t a major department. The course seemed shrouded in mystery, and as much as I asked, the lecturer didn’t seem to understand I was looking for some inspiration to take up his course. I wasn’t told about any specific final year student projects, normal daily timetables or anything.

In Cambridge everything was laid out on the table, from the application process to the course contents. Cambridge do a general engineering course, and you don’t specialize until the second year, but the specialisation that inspired me most of all was ‘Geotechnical Engineering’. This is the point at which geography and engineering meet. Earth dams, tsunami-proof houses and landslide-proof pipes were all projects chosen by students. In my estimation, this is the best academic preparation for the mission field I can get. It gives me incredible joy to think how useful to God I could be with such skills, and that studying geography wasn’t wasted.

In addition to all this, Cambridge has a languages center as part of the engineering department itself, so I could carry on my German, and myabe take up another language too. Who knows? It’s in God’s hands anyway.

Now I get to my results. The sad thing is that they are not good enough for me to get into Cambridge yet.

1. German: A
2. Maths: A
3. Physics: B
4. Geography: C

I’ve dropped geography in response to these results in order to focus on the subjects I am good at, and thus raise my chances of getting to Cambridge. I prayed about this decision. I asked for peace before, during, and after making it, but now I must admit I am not certain of it. It doesn’t cause me to lose sleep at night, but I don’t know what God’s will is at all. I’m sure it’s not too late to change back, but God will bless me either way I’m sure. My mother told me, “Don’t worry about what God wants you to do all the time. God gives you desires, what do you want to do?” I want to be useful to God, but I felt so ill-equipped to make that decision, I feel so far from God. I wasn’t trusting him like I should have, and I knew it. Maybe God gave me those results to make me drop it, or maybe it was a challenge. Who knows?

That’s all for now, I might write some other post another day. God Bless

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 1st, 2007 at 8:18 pm and is filed under Announcements, Christian Thoughts, News . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.