Ms. Lindsay Cochrum, M.S.

Today I officially passed my master’s degree comprehensive exam and qualified to graduate in 39 days with a master’s degree in student affairs administration in higher education. I’m trying to take it all in.

Honestly, passing my comps was sort of given. I don’t mean that in a flippant way; I just mean that our program prepares us well for our field, and solving and presenting a case study using all the skills and knowledge I learned in the past two years was more of a natural culmination than a grueling test. So it was a big deal, but it also wasn’t.

I guess it’s just strange for me to think that in a little more than a month, I’m done with College Station. I’m done with homework and reading and writing papers (for now.) It’s a little hard to grasp after being in school full-time for 19 years. (NINETEEN YEARS??)

It’s a little hard to grasp because two years here FLEW. I remember this time last year looking up to my second-year-friend Erica and thinking she was so grown up and accomplished and professional, and she is. But so am I! I am that second year that Erica was applying for jobs and going off into the real world. When did that happen?

So much as transpired over the past two years here. I’ve grown so much. I am constantly astounded by much growth occurs in such short spans on time. God works quickly! Two years ago preparing to graduate from Mizzou seems so long ago. I thought I was mature then, and I was, but I’ve grown even more since then.

I joined a new church and a new homegroup.
I made an entirely new set of friends.
I lived with roommates for the first time since I was a freshman.
I wrote 20-page papers like it was nothing.
I read and read and read for class.
I read for fun some, too.
I advised student groups.
I counseled students.
I went through heartbreak and conflict with friends that ended well by the grace of the Lord.
I got a cat.
I left the country.
I lived in Oregon.
I experienced the Lord in new and intimate ways.
My love for worship and my skills in that area blossomed.
I had my first date.
I had my first kiss.
I entered the stage of life where close friends start getting married.
I had bed bugs.
My first close relative passed away.
I shared the gospel with someone and then got to baptize them!
I somewhat conquered my fear of biking.
I was reunited with wildflower season in Texas.
I went to my first professional work conferences and met people in my field from across the country.
And so much more.

The next two years of my life are pretty hazy, but I am PRIMED for some BIG life transitions again. I’m not entirely sure where I will be and what I will be doing and with whom I’ll be doing things, but I know it’ll be good and that the Lord will continue to provide for me and grow me.

It all goes back to my blog title that I picked when I was just a wee-little 20-year old half-way through her junior year of college.

I am in progress. And I’m excited to see the progress that occurs in the next two years.

Why I care about the SEC

Truman the Tiger and Reveille chilling at the “Welcome to the SEC” weekend for Mizzou and A&M.

As some of you may know, this Sunday marked Texas A&M and Mizzou’s entrance into the NCAA Southeastern Conference. This is big deal in many ways, from more prestige for both schools, to a more equitable sharing of varsity sports profits, to all sorts of sports/higher education-related politics I don’t even fully understand. But that’s not really why I care about this move.

If you know me, you might know I’m not the biggest sports fan in the world. Yes, I enjoy a good Mavs game, will take you up on a night at the Rangers Stadium (though I would never take time out to watch a baseball game on TV; blech), and will deck myself out in black & gold or maroon & white every Saturday all fall. But in general, I’m not a sports fanatic. I’ll go to sporting events or watch them as a social activity with friends, but I don’t really have a stake in who wins. I don’t follow any professional teams*, and I only really care if the Aggies or Tigers win. Don’t ask me anything about other teams; chances are I don’t know. And honestly, at this point, I’m doing good even to remember the main football players for A&M and Mizzou. I’ve lost all sense of who plays on their basketball teams. National Championship? If it’s not Tigers or Aggies, it’s really not of interest to me. Super Bowl? I’m there for the food, the commercials, the halftime show, and to watch the Brynsvold Twins watch the game. (They’re the real entertainment.) I don’t even care about the BCS vs. a playoff system. Unless A&M/Mizzou gets screwed. Don’t mess with my two teams. Top 25 ranking? No Tigers, no Aggies? I’m not checking it.

So then you might be wondering why Saturday at midnight my Twitter feed exploded with SEC insanity. Well, it’s because this means more to me than sports. This is two of my favorite places in the entire world united together. I love it.

My tweets from June 30/July 1, 2012.

Mizzou and A&M are my homes. I met my best friends there. I grew up there. They are the last 5 years of my life, and those have been some formative years, let me tell you. So the fact that they’re both here together, newbies in the SEC, warms my heart.

It’s like Colorado LT. Colorado has brought so many different groups of my friends and mixed them all up. My sister and a friend from high school met my Mizzou friends. My Mizzou friends made Aggie friends, and then I met them in Texas. And now my Aggie friends are back in Colorado meeting more Mizzou friends. ALL MY WORLDS ARE COLLIDING, AND IT’S AWESOME.

Allie, who I discipled at Mizzou, and Kristina, who I will be living with at A&M in the fall, sharing a milkshake. WORLDS COLLIDE.

My sister and a bunch of my Mizzou friends hiking Eagle Cliff last summer.

So the SEC just seems to be a continuation. My favorite places on earth continuing to exist together and collide. Plus it doesn’t hurt that I don’t have to keep up with two conferences to watch my two favorite teams. And it guarantees a yearly “WHAT COLOR DO I WEAR MY TEAMS ARE PLAYING EACH OTHER AND I’M TORN” moment. And an excuse for my Mizzou friends to come watch a game in Texas or me to follow the Aggies up to Missouri.

My maroon Mizzou T-shirt so I can support both my teams.

So I guess it does kind of have to do with sports. Whatever.

*This is not to say I’m a bandwagonner. If I have to pledge allegiance to sports teams, I’ve picked them: Dallas Mavericks for basketball (leftover from the days when I did actually follow them. I miss Steve Nash and Dirk Nowitzski’s bromance.), Texas Rangers for baseball, Dallas Stars for hockey? (I’ve never watched hockey in my life), Team USA for the Olympics (duh), and Italy for other international sports-related endeavors. Because, you know, it’s the only country outside the US I’ve been to. That’s legit, right?

#sagrad blog

You probably have no idea what #sagrad means. Well, just so we’re all on the same page, #sagrad is the official Twitter hashtag for those of us grad students who are studying student affairs, or college student personnel, higher education administration, or whatever else they’re calling these programs these days (sa standing for “student affairs”). We have our own little online community!

In any case, my cohort of 12 #sagrad classmates and I are keeping a blog this summer that will follow us at our various internships across the country world. We’ve got people going everywhere from California, to Alaska, to Georgia, to Colorado, to Qatar! I just posted my first post today. You can check it out here:

The Life of an SA Intern: Texas A&M’s Student Affairs Administration in Higher Education (SAAHE) Class of 2013 Summer Internship Blog

I’m not sure how often I’ll be posting, or if I’ll be reiterating info here, but more than likely I will let you guys know when I post over there! So check out my first post! I’m just a little less than a month away from Oregon!

It could be worse

I got a little story secret for you, Ags friends. (Haha! Secret! Get it?!)

There was a time during my junior year of college where I was probably more stressed out than I’ve ever been in my life. I say “probably” only because I think I repressed a lot of the memories in order to cope with the insanity that was my life, and I can’t be sure it was the absolute most stressed out I’ve ever been.

At the time, I was taking only 12 hours of class, but that included Magazine Editing (fun but super time consuming), Infographics (fun but ALSO super time consuming with an 8-hour newspaper shift each week), an honors humanities class (not fun and super time consuming), and an honors-by-contract 20th Century American history class (a sad attempt to get rid of an upper-division social science requirement). On top of this I was working four jobs: I was a peer advisor in Mark Twain Hall (10-20 hours a week depending), the front desk supervisor (10 hours a week), a marketing intern for ResLife (10 hours a week), and a journalism school tour guide (4-6 hours a month, thank goodness).

Needless to say, I didn’t sleep much, and you can bet I didn’t get around to all my reading. (This resulted in my first ever C’s. Two glaring C+’s next to two gleaming A’s. I cared about journalism; I did not care about Beowulf or the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory.)

During this time, my life was sometimes pretty darn pathetic. There was the time my friend Katie and I stayed up into the wee hours of the night studying literature and art of Early Modern World (think Augustine, Beowulf, and Canterbury Tales) when Katie dumped an entire bowl of ramen on my dorm room floor because I tripped on stray papers. There was the fact that I frequently went to 1:1 meetings with my boss in my pajamas (perks of having a resLife). And then there was the time I did my entire Infographics final project in one night, moving into the basement computer lab of Twain at 6 p.m. and coming out at 6 a.m, bleary-eyed from staring at a giant Mac screen all night. And then there were the deodorant tissues. But we’ll get back to those.

Katie and the ramen

As this semester starts careening toward the end, the stress has risen to new levels. I don’t even want to list off the number of presentations and papers I have. Not to mention stresses unrelated to school, i.e. friends, prepping for the summer, work, roommates, the fact that my room flooded last week, the fact that I still don’t know what’s been making me itchy for the past 3 months, the fact that I haven’t signed my lease for the fall, the fact that I have to transition out of my current work position and prep it for someone else to take over in two months, etc. It’s starting to take a toll on my sanity.

Ah, but I bet you are thinking, “Tell me about the deoderant tissues! What are deoderant tissues?!” We’re getting there. Deoderant tissues are the benchmark on the scale of Pathetic that says, “THIS IS ROCK BOTTOM.”

You see, my junior year I was so busy and stressed out, I couldn’t even find the time to go buy basic necessities I had run out of, like deodorant and toothpaste. At one point during the middle of the spring semester, I remember lamenting with my co-peer advisor Amy that neither of us had been to the grocery store in weeks and that we were staring to run out of essentials. At one point, I was working my way through several travel-sized tubes of toothpaste because that’s all I had. And the only deodorant I had access to was the remnants of a semi-exploded gel stick. The gel wasn’t even in the stick of the deodorant anymore. It was all in the lid. And you better believe I used a tissue to wipe some of that gel deodorant from the lid to my armpits.

Like I said: rock bottom.

Thankfully, once my mom heard of my pathetic state she sent my a care package with toothpaste and deodorant. My boss and hall director also was horrified at my sad existence and offered to pick whatever I needed up on her next grocery run. I probably wouldn’t have survived that spring without both those marvelous ladies.

Thankfully Spring 2012 hasn’t quite hit the level of Spring 2010. It’s vying for that spot, but I’m managing for now. And I have extra toothpaste and deodorant in my bathroom cabinet, don’t you worry.

Lazy Saturday

Today I really should be spending all my time reading and writing about color-blind racism for my Multicultural Issues in Student Affairs class. But I’m not. Instead I’m…

1. Recovering from an awesome lock-in retreat for my fabulous AOLP students. I love them, but sleeping for approximately 3 hours on a love seat while listening to them go on about A&M debut in the SEC next year left me tuckered out! When I got home this morning, I slept from 7:30 until 1…

2011-2012 AOLP Execs

Execs and OLMs from the Blue Toad team skitting it up last night

2. Catching up on my John & Hank Green videos. These YouTube celebs make vlogs about random observations, but have also recently branched off into a few other YouTube channels about trivia, world history & biology, and general science. Watching them reminds me of my childhood days of Bill Nye on PBS. I just always feel smarter after a marathon of Green Brothers’ videos!

Plus these guys have awesome taste and lead you to great new internet discoveries, such as this mini-documentary about the Salton Sea in Califonia.

3. Watching some MU/ku hoops. It’s the final scheduled match-up between Mizzou and our rivals, Kansas. Go Tigers! (It was 44-32 at half time. Largest half-time deficit in 5 years at Kansas!)

4. Getting mentally prepared to cover myself in blue paint and get some free Blue Baker for dinner! Looking forward to tonight’s homegroup hangout.

Racism can wait until tomorrow.

Reflecting back: 1-year anniversary of interviewing at A&M

This week marks the one year anniversary of my SAAHE interview conference (when I came and interviewed for grad school).

It’s weird to think back to a year ago and the emotions I was facing. I was so nervous and unsure. I wanted to get into A&M so badly.

The interview conference was stressful and intimidating, though also fun. I thought I was hot student-affairs-stuff when I came to the conference, but it turned out so was everyone else. I left the interview feeling good but also nervous.

And then there was the whole plane fiasco on the way home, which perfectly embodies Texas Monthly’s over story for March:

I luv Southwest!

And then there was the day I found out what I would be doing for the next two years. The day it snowed. The opening day of True/False 2011. The day Amanda Craven watched me jump around my basement apartment with excitement. The day Kelli told me, “You impressed the pants off of us,” and “We were able to match your #1 choice with New Student Programs, and you were their #1 choice.” The day I told Kelli, “I accept! Yes, right now!” Best day.

My "life deciding party" after accepting my offer to A&M

And now we’re here, a year later. I’m nearly 3/8 done with grad school. I’m working in what I considered at the time to be my “dream assistantship” (it has been pretty great…). I’m hosting two of my own SAAHE candidates. It wasn’t that long ago that I was in their shoes.  It makes me wonder where I’ll be in a year! (Job searching, most likely. Yikes!)

PS: Fun side fact! When I interviewed at A&M, we took a campus tour lead by a student named Gabe. He is now one of the primary students I advise! Yay!

Texas is jealous of my love for Missouri

So remember that time I moved away from Mizzou back to Texas and how excited I was about that? Remember how I craved Texas? Remember how I obsessed about Texas A&M? WELL THE HONEYMOON PERIOD IS OVER, Y’ALL.

I mean, not really. I honestly do love Texas and wouldn’t trade being here for the world, but seriously, Texas is getting a little jealous and territorial, and I’m feeling a little smothered. IT WON’T LET ME CONNECT WITH MISSOURI. Some examples:

1. Homecoming
This year was Mizzou’s 100th Homecoming, and it was a big, freaking deal. I was trying to make every plan to go back to Missouri for the occasion, but it never came through, and the cherry on top was the fact that I had to work New Family Welcome that weekend. The fates did not want me to return to CoMO.

2. Mizzou vs. A&M (football)
The Tigers came to town at the end of October to play the Aggies. Along with the team came some of my good friends from Mizzou. Did I get to go to that game? Was I even in town that weekend? NO. Again for work, though this time it was for an all-expenses-paid trip to New Orleans, so I can only complain so much.

3. Mizzou vs. A&M (basketball)
The #3 ranked Missouri Tigers are coming to town to face off  against A&M this weekend. And I had the opportunity to go for free because I signed up for The Big Event. I, however, will be in Oklahoma City. For work. CRUEL WORLD.

4. Mizzou vs. A&M (baseball)
Our homegroup could possibly be going to Austin that weekend. This is just getting ridiculous.

5. Spring Break
I have the time off, but because Columbia is 2 hours from an airport and I don’t want to pay for a shuttle/spend my entire week there, I’m not going to visit. Besides, all my friends would be in school because we have different spring breaks. Womp womp.

But we haven’t even gotten to the pièce de résistance yet. Oh no. That’s what went down tonight. It’s a little different because it isn’t necessarily Texas keeping me away from Missouri… I mean in a way it is, but it’s almost like Missouri is trying to entice me and Texas is rubbing it in my face that I can’t make it work. Rude.

6. The Rocket Summer
I love The Rocket Summer. Everyone knows Bryce Avery is my favorite artist ever. I count him among the influential people in my life. I’m a little obsessed. Despite this fact, I have never seen a honest-to-goodness TRS headlining show. I’ve seen Bryce twice: once when he opened for One Republic at Harding University and once when he played a solo show in Dallas. I can’t count the number of times I have missed Dallas headlining shows because I lived in Missouri at the time.

WELL NOW THE TABLES HAVE TURNED. SORT OF.
I found out tonight that The Rocket Summer and Switchfoot (another one of my faves) are touring together in April & May. Guess where they’re playing on April 26. COLUMBIA FREAKING MISSOURI. Whyyyyy, Bryce and Jon, whyyyyyy? I waited patiently for four years for you to come, and you never did. I literally talked to Bryce about The Blue Note when I met him in Arkansas. This is just cruel. I mean, it’s still not a headlining show, but seeing two awesome bands within walking distance of where I lived in MO would have been so awesome. Thankfully they’re stopping in Frisco. And even though that’s kind of far away I WILL be at that show, dangit.

So Texas, honey, I promise to stay faithful to you. I am not going anywhere. If you let me see Missouri or some Tigers, I won’t run back to Mizzou with them. Seriously. I’m here for the long haul. Can you just lighten up a little?

 

The Divine Experiment

Hello. My name is Lindsay Cochrum, and I am a Facebookaholic.

I spend countless hours each week reviewing people’s status updates, going through my friends’ pictures and occasionally even Facebook stalking new people I meet. Hours a week. Sometimes, after a particularly pointless and time-wasting Facebook sesh, I actually feel really bad about myself, guilty, like I know I just wasted hours doing crap, nothing. There was a point where Facebook was the first thing I went to when I woke up in the morning. I needed my social media fix the moment I woke up.

I think a lot of people probably are like this, but I also know a lot aren’t. Lately I feel like I’ve been able to at least cut out that morning need to check, but I still waste so much of my time each week on that stupid website.

A lot of the time I justify the obsession with my desire to keep in touch with my friends. Most of the people I know don’t live in College Station, thus I use Facebook as a tool to catch up with friends from high school, Mizzou and Colorado. But honestly, that’s not what I spend the majority of my time on Facebook doing. It’s just gotten out of control.

I have known this for quite some time, and honestly have even felt convicted about it—like convicted that I needed to give it up—but I haven’t ever really tried that hard. But for the next three weeks, I’m finally going to do something about it.

Enter the Divine Experiment. The Divine Experiment is a three-week time of corporate fasting and prayer sponsored by several of the campus ministries here at Texas A&M. During this time they encourage students to fast from things together, and they host prayer and worship meetings every day, in the mornings during the week and in the evenings on the weekend. In general they encourage media fasts (internet, TV, movies, etc.) but everyone is encouraged to pray for what they should fast from. Some of my friends have done special food fasts or even lived in a tent for three weeks, fasting from their house and its comforts.

This is what I feel like God is leading me to fast from:

• Facebook
  Already explained.
• Twitter
  Along the same lines, though I don’t waste quite as much time on there as I do on Facebook.
• Non-spiritual blogs
  I read a zillion blogs about design, food, Mormon mommies, typography, crafts, etc. It takes up a lot of time, so I’m cutting it out for three weeks. I will, however, continue to read my close friends’ blogs as they usually encourage me spiritually.
• TV
  I’m attempting to follow 10 shows this season. So far I have kept up with the past two weeks, but only because I was sick and confined to bed for several days this past week. From now on, watching that many shows is probably not going to be the best use of my time, so I’m adding it to my three-week fast as well.
• Movies
  I don’t actually spend much of my time watching movies, but we’ll just add it to the media list for good measure.
• People after 10:30 p.m. Sunday – Wednesday
  I have a problem with FOMO (fear of missing out). And when you live in a house with four other girls, there are always cool conversations going on that I don’t want to miss out on. Unfortunately, this usually leads to way too many late nights and a lot of sleep deprivation. That’s why I am going to start getting ready for bed at 10:30 and be in my bed at 11 p.m. on school nights, aka Sunday – Wednesday. As much as I love talking to my roommates, we can talk when I’m not supposed to be in bed.

That being said, I hope you will pray for me and my homegroup as we go through this time of fasting and prayer. Each week focuses on a different theme: humbling yourself, seeking God’s face and repenting. Also October is going to be a crazy month in general. Not only are we doing the Divine Experiment, but we are also going to IHOP‘s OneThing conference this weekend and ending the three-week fast with our church’s fall Spiritual Challenge Weekend retreat. I’m praying God does a lot of healing, encounters us in new ways, teaches us to hear his voice and draws us closer to him during this time.

I will try to blog for the next three weeks to keep you updated on what God is doing, but as you have noticed, I haven’t been the most consistent blogger as of late. Maybe that will change when I give up all my time-wasters!

“If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.” —2 Chronicles 7:14

Stop the bus

This might sound weird, but lately, God has been romancing me with the bus.

You see, commuting is one of my least favorite things ever. After living on campus for four years at Mizzou, driving to and from campus is really hard for me. Especially driving home. The traffic between 4-6 p.m. in College Station is heavy, and I can’t handle it. All I want to do after class and work is go home as quickly as possible.

So twice a week, usually, I take the bus as a way to save gas and also possibly to avoid road rage behind the wheel of a large SUV. And I’m not sure when it started, but I’ve just starting noticing some cool things about the bus…

I don't know when the next bus is, but God knows!

The thing is, I never have to wait for a bus, and there is always a seat for me. This might not be that weird if I regularly checked the bus schedule or got on the bus at the first stop, but I don’t. I never check the schedule, and going to campus, my stop is the third-to-last stop on the route. The buses come every 5-7 minutes, so it’s never a terribly long wait, but I’m serious: I never wait. Ever. Not even on game day. And the buses are pretty popular, so a lot of the time during peak commuting hours it’s standing room only on those things. But I don’t remember the last time I had to stand on the bus. I think it might have been during the first week of school.

I really think these convenient coincidences are one of the many ways God chooses to bless and romance me! I think God really enjoys giving us small gifts throughout the day because he loves us. For me a lot of the time, that’s a cool morning or waking up naturally on time or even hitting all the green lights on the way home when I drive to campus. Here’s a story to prove my point, I think:

This morning I was running a few minutes late for work. As I locked up my apartment, I thought to myself, “I wonder if God will hold the bus for me. I usually come out 3-5 minutes earlier than this, so I might have missed it. Oh well. They come every 5-7 minutes, so I probably won’t have to wait for long.”

I walked into the parking lot of my apartment complex and saw the #22 bus pulling away from my stop. “Shoot. Missed it. Oh, well!” I started walking towards the bus stop when, less than 30 seconds later, another #22 bus pulls up. Now you have to understand, this doesn’t happen. The buses are never that close together. They’re always at least 5 minutes apart. I got on the bus and I was the only passenger. No one else was on that bus! And I had never seen a bus like this one before. It was an older model with pull string to signal stops and a weird seat configuration. We didn’t even stop at the next stop because there wasn’t anyone waiting, so we pulled to the next stop behind the first #22 bus. That’s how close we were — mere seconds behind the first one. That never happens! Two people got on at that last stop, and then we drove to campus. Just me and two random other dudes. That bus was practically a private ride to school for me. Once we got to school, the bus actually dropped me off in a different spot than it normally does. Although my bus had been flashing the #22 route number, it dropped us off at the #1 route stop. And then it starting flashing “Out of Service.”

Y’all, I’m serious. God sent that bus just for me. I really can’t explain it otherwise, and I just felt the need to share.

The tangled web I weave

The idea of connection is a huge theme in my life. In my mind, everything in my life is connected. My life is a continuous chain of events, each part connected to the next. I am unable to see parts of my life without the context of what brought me to a specific point and what that specific point did to alter my life. For example:

1. My family is weirdly close to my dentist. This is partly because there are six people in my family who go to the same dentist, but also partly because my dentist is also my orthodontist, and after putting three kids through braces, we were at the dentist office a lot. Also my dentist’s receptionist is his wife, so we know her well, too. In short, my dentist is a family friend.
2. The summer after my freshman year of college, I needed a place to live in Columbia. I ended up rooming with my dentist’s daughter because, “coincidentally,” (I don’t really believe in coincidences anymore) she was also at Mizzou, 700 miles away from home.
3. While I lived with Dentist’s Daughter, I met a lot of her friends from Sigma Phi Lambda, the Christian sorority at Mizzou. They convinced me to join in the fall.
4. Once I joined Phi Lamb, I came across the problem of conflicting sorority meetings and church small group meetings. Because of this and a few other reasons, I decided to find a different campus ministry for the last half of my time at Mizzou.
5. Enter my friend John, who invited to me to The Rock.
6. After 6 months with The Rock, I decided to go to Colorado LT during the summer of 2010.
7. At LT I met all my Aggie friends and fell in love with A&M.
8. I applied and got into A&M.
9. I moved to College Station and will start class here in just more than a week.

So the moral of the story is I’m at Texas A&M because my family is freakishly close to my dentist.

I realize this is a somewhat weird way to look at life, but I just can’t help it. That’s how it makes sense in my head. So much so that one of my top five StrengthsQuest strengths is Connectedness. EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED.

And God has been faithful to show me just how connected my life is recently.

Exhibit A: LT
LT 2011 was possibly one of the biggest webs of connections for me ever. Although I wasn’t there, the majority of my Mizzou canvas group was. And so was my sister. And our friend from high school. Plus random acquaintances from A&M. And returners from LT 2010. And they all mixed and met and connected. My Mizzou friend Michelle led a project group with my A&M/LT 2010 friend Brett. My Mizzou friend Sam befriended the daughter of my new A&M pastor. And then there’s the life group of Ethan, Jason and Cody.

I went to high school with Ethan, I went to Mizzou with Jason, and now I go to school with Cody, though I don’t know him hardly at all. All these people from various places in my life meshed together and met one another. They connected.

Exhibit B: East Asia
One of my roommates here in College Station just recently got back from a mission trip to East Asia with a group from our church. As she was talking about the trip, she mentioned the name of the missionary they worked with there. When she said his name, I instantly recognized it, though I wasn’t sure if it was the same person I was thinking about

“Wait… was he from Texas?”
“Yeah, he was from the Dallas area.”
“I think he was my friends’ youth minister.”
“Uhhhh… what?!”

I texted a few friends from high school and discovered that yes, it was in fact their youth minister. In summary, my roommates from grad school spent four weeks in East Asia with my friends from high school’s ex-youth minister.
Yeah. In the words of my friend Allen, “And people say there isn’t a God.”

Exhibit C: My Ship
If you’ve followed my blog, you know about my blog friend Kate. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, read this.) The story of how we “met” is a weird connection in itself. But today, I got a phone call from my friend Katie at Mizzou.

“You’ll never guess who we just met.”
“Uhhhh… yeah, you’re right. Who did you meet?”
“THE SHIP! WE MET THE SHIP!”

Kate met my Mizzou friends at Which Wich. In line. Just chatting. WHAT ARE THE ODDS OF THAT, PEOPLE?! So now my blog friend has met my Mizzou friends and my pastor.

Text from Ed: “Just met Kate at the [outreach] table. She’s a J-School grad student. She said you guys connected after she stalked your blog.”

Yes, Ed, we did connect. And now she’s connected with my Mizzou family!

I feel like God is using me as some sort of weird connector, a strange link between unrelated people. This has happened in the past, too. I’ve introduced a couple of roommates to each other and things like that. I’m not sure exactly what good it does, or why it keeps happening, but for some reason, it makes me very happy to have my worlds constantly colliding.