A quick Update.

This is the first chance I've really had to post on my blog since I've gotten to Bombardopolis in NW Haiti. First things first...it's humid. A shower every night is not just a suggestion, it's a must if you want to feel anywhere close to clean.

Wednesday we left Port-Au-Prince for the 10 hour trip to Bombard. I spent about 3.5 hours in the back of the truck and the rest of the time crammed in the cab with 3 other people. Awesome trip, with things they call "roads" that would hardly pass for anything in the States.

The whole trip from Port to Bombard was done along the coast line, and most of it was dry and barren. Once we got to Bombard, however, it was a lot nicer and greener, primarily because of the elevation. We are up on a mountain, and it makes a huge difference.

Thursday and Friday were spent unloading medical supplies and re-stocking the clinic shelves with them. That was a bit hot, since the stock room is about 11 feet by 5 feet including the shelves that run around the perimeter of the room. It has no ventilation except for the door, and there were three of us in there. Friday afternoon I went with Steve to Beine-de-heine (an hours trip each way) to return home a woman and some of her friends/family from the hospital where she'd been brought two nights before to give birth. The brakes on the ambulance pretty much failed on the way there, so that was exciting. At some point, I think Steve and I are going to bleed the brakes. He is pretty sure that it was just the constant riding of the brakes as we went downhill that caused the brake fluid to not recirculate and get overheated, changing the composition of the fluid and making it ineffective. Hopefully just bleeding them and replacing the old fluid with new fluid will help. :)

I woke up this morning at 4:15, as I have every morning I've been here for some reason. This morning, however, I woke up to a recorded church service being played on some speakers quite loudly from some distance away. I recognized one of the songs "He Loves Me". Unfortunately, upon being woken up, I learned that I had a migraine, I think from tension in my neck. I basically couldn't move, and even then it hurt. I took some tension headache Excedrin and laid back down. I didn't go back to sleep until after breakfast, and even then did not sleep long. I finally got an awesome neck rub, and that relieved enough pressure on my neck that I was able to sleep for a few hours. My neck has been hurting the whole day, although not nearly as bad as it was this morning. I've taken 2 more Excedrin and a total of 1200 mg of Ibuprofen today just to keep the pain down. As long as I don't lean over, I don't black out or have too much pain. :j Hopefully I will feel better soon. Planning on moving to a new bed tonight though, since the one I was sleeping on is really really soft, and I don't think my back liked that. The new bed is quite a bit harder.

As I laid down mid-morning, I put in my earbuds and listened to a sermon by Matt Chandler entitled "The Art of Remembrance". Totally awesome sermon, and a must-listen to. Here is the link to download it if you are interested: http://denton.thevillagechurch.net/sermons?kw=Art+of+Remembrance&type=sermons&match=all.

We are taking care of two preemies right now. They were born yesterday, and are sooo cute! I held one of them for a while today, and it stopped crying immediately. :-D

Okay, now to try to respond to some emails before it's time for my birthday dinner! We are having homemade ravioli, italian creme cake (without the coconut), coke, popcorn, and watching a movie, Spartacus! :) Hopefully it will be a fun night.

Much love,
Josiah

Port-au-Prince, Haiti

Bonjou!

I am currently sitting on my bed in the guest house in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, testing out the internet connection that I should have for a couple of days while I am still in Port. 

I made it here safely, obviously, and have not died of heatstroke, although I must say I feel that I am languishing on my deathbed from the humidity. It's a bit...warm. It's relatively okay when the breeze is blowing though, which is a majority of the time so far. 

I have had an excellent time so far, having gone on a bit of a walk with the missionaries I'm staying with and having quite a nice chat with Steve (one of the missionaries) about several topics, including: the settling of this island by the Spanish and then the eventual take over by the French, the slave population and uprising here compared to what North America's slave population was like, Old Testament prophecies, CLEP tests, and the difference between America's rebellion and Haiti's slave rebellion. Hmm...run on sentence, I think. :) 

All that to say, I'm enjoying myself so far, and am looking forward to dinner! :) 

Pictures seem to be taking a very long time to upload, and I cannot even see forward progress...so I'm not sure if I'll be able to post or not..

- Josiah

Blog Headers....

So, if you've been paying any attention at all to my blog, you might have seen that my blog header changes periodically...like twice an hour when I'm working on it. I'm trying to fix up my blog to make it both aesthetically pleasing and quick to load. I took off two embedded videos and two embedded scrolling lyrics to speed up the page load time, which I believed helped significantly.

If you are viewing this, and have an opinion on either the aesthetic-ness or load time of this blog, please let me know! :)

- Strider

Should God be taken seriously?

A friend of mine had a quote from Epicurus on his facebook status. I thought I would reproduce the quote and my thoughts on it here for you guys to read. Enjoy!

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him god?
~ Epicurus

The Lord is not slow about His promise, as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing for any to perish but for all to come to repentance." - 2 Peter 3:9

God is able, but not willing...but that does not make him malevolent, simply merciful.

So...the obvious question would be: How can God exist when all this evil stuff in the world keeps persisting?

Wrong question. Ask again. How come God hasn't let you (or me) feel the wrath of sin? What you thought last night deserves a first class flight to hell where God doesn't dwell.

Some people say that God isn't real because they don't see how a good God could exist or allow all this evil stuff in the world. If God is real, then He should stop all this evil because He's all powerful, right?

What is evil, though? It's anything that is against God, it's anything that's morally bad or wrong. It's murder, rape, stealing, lying, cheating. But if we want God to stop evil, do we want Him to stop all of it or just a little bit of it? If He stops us from doing evil things, what about lying, or what about our evil thoughts? Where do you stop? The murder level? the lying level? Or the thinking level? If we want Him to stop evil, we have to be consistent. We can't just pick and choose. That means you and I should be eliminated, right? Because we think evil stuff. If that's true, then we should be eliminated! But thanks be to God that Jesus stepped in to save us from our sins! Christ died for all evilness!

God is Able, but not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance. Evil exists only because of His mercy. Don't take that for granted.

(some thoughts and sentences taken from "Truth" by Lecrae)

Peeling (warning: gross)

I have a secret for all of you guys. I hope you can keep it! I got a sunburn on Saturday/Sunday because I've been working on cleaning out the gutters on the garage and house and installing gutter guard. Quite the project, let me tell you. Anyways, my sisters have this weird thing about dead skin. They LOVE to peel if off of me...or anyone, for that matter. The delight in seeing if they can get great big sheets of sunburned skin to peel off. It's somewhat disturbing to me, and so I am trying not to have them find out that I am currently peeling. But I also have this urge to find out if any of them read my blog....sooooo: I'm posting this as a bit of a test. I know if they read this, they'll be in my room in two shakes of a tulip tree in the wind. If they don't, I just might get away with a sunburn and no peeling sisters this time! :-D

Note: I don't really mind all the much if my sisters peel my shoulders, as it hurts my neck if I try to stare at my shoulders and peel away dead skin for any extended period of time.

Okay, I guess that's enough for now. :-D

Ugh...got to keep up with this thing!

Wellll....I can't decide if I really want to pick this back up or not. I think I shall, if only to get people to read this again before I ... well, I shouldn't get ahead of myself.

I'm going to Haiti this summer, from July 5th to August 16th, to help out in a medical clinic in the NW region. It's run by a missionary family that we know. I'm really looking forward to going, and I hope it will be both a spiritually enlightening and mentally and physically strengthening trip. Before I leave, I plan to post on something called G90X, which is similar to the body workout program called P90X...except better, in my humble opinion. Stayed tuned to hear more about that! :-D (<--- that's an incentive to get you to come back and read more. ;) ).

Last semester went well, as I finished with all A's in my classes. This Spring semester I took General Chemistry 2, Chemistry Lab, Hero and Quest, Human Genetics, and Introduction to Society. Genetics was quite involved, as I spent many hours in the lab sexing, typing, and counting fruit flies. Oh the joy, the happiness, the...anguish of sitting for hours (total) at a lab bench with your eyes glued to a microscope and the probe in your hand separating flies by sex and mutant characteristics. Anyways, that's done now, thank God! Intro to Society was laaaammmeee... as are most of the soft science general education classes. Easy A though. :-D Hero and Quest was different then any other class I've been in. Our professor told us the first day of class that he was not a teacher so much as he was a fellow colleague of ours wanting to help us on our journey in life. His goal in the class was to have non-consensus seeking arguments put forth and argued upon from our moral standpoints. Definitely an interesting class, especially when you have fairly fundamental Christians like myself arguing with liberal feminists.

This next semester, I have Anatomy, Physics, Communication, and a music history class. I've decided (at least until I get told I can't or something else comes up) that I'm gonna try to get a music minor at school. I have the 'time' (as far as credit hours go) to do so, and I figure I might as well try for another minor rather then taking meaningless classes. So we'll see how that goes. :-D

I also got an iPod Touch a few weeks ago. Definitely loving that. There's a website, http://www.freeappaday.com, that offers one application (normally non-free) per day for free. Sometimes the apps are cool and totally worth getting a checking out, and sometimes they are incredibly stupid. But, to each their own, and I know I've enjoyed some of the puzzle-type games that have been offered in the past.

Anyways, I think that's enough for now! Please check back soon, as I hope to keep this blog somewhat up-to-date pending my trip to Haiti. I'd like to have this blog serve as a medium to show/tell my experiences in Haiti.

So long for now!
~Strider

Do I dare?

*slowly ventures back into the world of blogging*

wow...not much going on, eh?

So...I'm in school...dropped university symphony to take the honors section of my Concepts in the Biomedical Sciences course. I think it's been worth it. The class involves freshman research, and is the only class at MSU to do that, and MSU is one of only three universities to do freshman research. So...basically for the last ten weeks I've been isolating, amplifying, cloning, and inserting a gene from Tetrahymena thermophila, - a pond organism - into E. coli cells. This will allow research to be done on this gene, which is a homolog to the Sirtuin 2 gene in homo sapiens, which regulates ...something with cell life longevity, and gene transcription silencing or something. Still working on that part. :p Anyways, different projects can then be done on the Ttherm gene to figure out what it does, and to make relevant generalizations to the Sirtuin2 gene in humans. It's actually related to cancer research, believe it or not.

As of now, I have A's in all of my classes. In fact, I have set the curve for both exams in psychology, and I have a 115% average in that class. Praise my God. :) BMS and Chemistry are both bordering on the "A" line, and my religions class (don't take religion at a state school, btw), is 94%, I think.

So...there's a quick update..enjoy!