BYU Round 2

It's official: I'm no longer a freshman. I didn't have to go find my classes before the first day and I could even go on auto-pilot walking across campus with complete faith that I'd end up in the right building on time. Let me tell you, it's a good feeling.

But with that feeling comes those "real life" feelings. My horse is here now and I'm the sole person responsible for her. No more of asking my parents or best friend a favor to pick up some wormer or call the vet if I can't. I work a lot and for a little while I've been holding up payments on my own. Of course I'm going from 40 down to 12 hours a week since summer is over, but still. My car has been a little messed up lately and instead of having my dad walk down to the garage to look at it, I actually have to take it in and PAY to find out what's wrong. What's up with that?

Honestly, though... things have never been better. I'm living with my best friend with a seemingly never ending supply of popsicles and Orange Crush, I see my horse every day and she's making HUGE improvements, I've got a nice boy in my life, and I am absolutely in love with my classes. All of them.

This semester, more than the last two I've had, has put a huge spiritual emphasis on everything. It's making me ever grateful for my BYU education and it's also blowing my mind. For example: In psychology, we talked about altruism... and our teacher said, "Wouldn't you worship Christ differently if he didn't have altruistic purposes?" Yeah. I think we would. And in the very next class, linguistics, we talked about how we probably speak a fallen language and someday we will speak a perfect language again. In the Book of Mormon, when Christ was praying, it was recorded that the people could not record what He was saying. Cool to think that someday we can comprehend that (and all things), right?

This first week of classes has made me SO thankful for this opportunity to study at BYU. There aren't many schools that will start class with an opening prayer and tie in Gospel principles to our everyday learning. In our evaluations at the end of the semester, there is always a question that asks how our professors tied in Gospel principles and if the class has somehow strengthened our testimony. Obviously in Book of Mormon, yes, my testimony improved, but in some other classes it was hard to decide which level of "not really" to choose. I'm amazed at how, already, the 5 classes I'm in have managed to open my eyes up to how the Gospel really does tie into everything. Let's just say I think this is going to be the best semester yet.

Our cute first day of school picture.