Journal #50 - Faith

Faith is an important part of the lives of everyone. Everyone deals with it, whether you are an avid church goer, or if you put your faith into something else. A majority of people put faith into something at some point in time. There are many times when you have to put your faith into other people. Times like these could happen when you are working on a project in a group of people and each person has to work on the different part of the project. Each person has to do their part of the project otherwise the project will fail. But the only way these projects will work is if each person puts their faith in the other people to get the project done. Faith is an important aspect to people's lives because everyone needs to believe in something. It is human nature to put their faith into things because there are many things that there are no explainations for. Such questions are like why are we here on this earth? What is our purpose? These questions do not have any specific answers beside what the bible tells us, or whatever other religions believe in. But we are not seeing these things with our eyes happening. We have to trust what is in the bible and what we read. We have to put our faith into things because we can not see everything with our won two eyes. A good synonym for faith is trust, because when we put our faith into something, we are trusting the being to get the job done. Or in religion's case we our trusting our God to take care of us and give us the strength to go about our daily buisness. I put my fatih in God and he delivers by protecting me each day. I think that by putting our faith in things, it is a good way of coping with all of the stresses that we deal with on a daily buissness. This puts stress onto other things instead of feeling that we have to do everything ourselves.

Journal #49 - Family

I spend a lot of time with my family because they are important to me. Until I could drive, I spent a lot of time doing things with my family such as playing games with them and going out to eat with them. Ever since my brother has gone to college, we have done even less stuff together. My brother, Andrew, goes to college up at Augustana in Rock Island. My dad is an accountant for RSM Mcgladrey and my mother is an RN at Memorial Medical Center. My favorite times of the year is in fact the holiday season because of all of my cousins that I get to see. We usually meet up at my aunt or uncles house down in St. Louis or in Chicago. We usually have amazing meals because everyone in my family has been trained to cook like my grandma. We celebrate Christmas, Thanksgiving, and Easter together. In all three of these holidays we always have huge feasts. I have many cousins, but I am the youngest on my mom's side and the the second youngest on my dad's side. I have cousins that are 33, 30, 28, 29, 35, 26, and 19. Those are on my mom's side. Then on my dad's side I only have cousins that are 20, 16, and 25. They live up in Chicago. I have always been far away from the ages of my cousins, so I can not relate to many of them. One of my cousins is a sucessful Anesthesiologist and he is married to a doctor. When he was a high schooler, he was also an all state golfer. I also have a cousin that is currently attending Truman State College in Missouri. The cousins on my dad's side include a graduate of Virginia, a current student at Dennison College where he plays tennis, and a high schooler that is a very good volleyball player. My extended family is very close because we get to see each other many times throughout the year. We even take a special vacation every year down to the Ozarks with my mom's side of the family. We spend time on the lake and we also get to use their boat. My family has given me a lot of great times.

Journal #48 - Spring Break

My spring break was a random assortment of activities. It always goes way too fast, yet somehow I feek ready to be back at school. On the first day of spring break I decided to embark on my first golf round of the year. I went with Quenten Hooker to Piper Glen Golf Course and we played the back nine. I ended up playing a lot better than expected for not playing since Sectionals in October, but I still made some stupid mistakes. I was hitting my driver quite well for only hitting one fairway. My irons were average, and my putting was very good for having such a long time off. Then next day of spring break was a track invitational at Greenville. I ended up running the open 400 in 53.3 seconds, which was good enough for 3rd place. I was satisfied with this time because this was my first open 400 race of the year and 53.3 already ties my best time for last season. I am excited to continue the season this week. Last thursday was another meet at rochester. This was a very important meet because we broke the school record in the 4x800 meter relay. This was our first and only time running it, we put a team together just to see if we could beat the record. On the days that I did not have meets, i decided to play some ultimate sports with my friends. My friends and I played basketball, ultimate tennis, and a new game that we created called sky ball. What we did was the game was like ultimate ball played in middle school. But instead of a dodgeball, we used a sky ball, which can be found in a sporting goods store. Instead of throwing the ball you have to bounce the ball once to your teammate. You try and score the ball in a goal by bouncing it in. It was a very fun game, but it was dark when we played it so it was kind of difficult. I also had to work on homework during spring break.