Yay!! Acceptance & Plane Tickets!!!

WOW!  So this morning I (Kris) got up at 2.30am to check on Jayna’s email to see if she had gotten accepted yet.  You see, in South Africa if you want your Masters then right after getting your undergraduate degree of THREE YEARS, you must proceed onto an Honor’s Program that’s aim is to get you prepped for your two years Master’s program.  Only in the States our “Honor’s program” is tied into our four year undergraduate program.  This however, is unbeknkown to the international office of Stellenbosch, so Jayna’s application was in quuee for several WEEKS!

Not knowing whether Jayna was accepted or not has made us wait on purchasing plane tickets, student visas and student insurance.  So I checked at 2am and she still wasn’t in.  BUT THEN, at 9am our time, I checked and was pleased to see that Stellenbosch was pleased to tell me that SHE’S IN!!!  It was such a great discovery.  So I ran upstairs and let Jayna read the email.  We freaked out and praised God.

Since then, we’ve purchased our plane tickets!!  Weird.  It’s final.  We’re leaving the States on January 17, 2010!

So from here, with God’s help, we plan to get student visas and insurance so that we can actually cross the big blue sea without get deported back.  :)

Anyways, after long weeks of waiting things look like they are finally starting to get rolling.  May God continue to pave our way!

Orphans, Kenya and Glue

Just off the main street running through the centre of Eldoret you will find an army of glue-sniffing street kids.

Almost all the children have a small bottle of glue hanging from their mouths and with glazed eyes they appear semi tranquilised.

“It makes me sleepy and I have less stress,” says 15-year-old Jimmy, who after years on the streets looks younger than 10.

“I live on the verandas in a box,” he tells me.

“Life here is very hard with no food, nowhere to sleep and no-one to care for you,” says Evans Kariuki.

“It is not safe. You can die here. People fight. There is a lot of violence. The police come sometimes and take you and beat you.”

See the full article here.

Awesome Flashcard App for Mac Users

You must check this out!  Mental Case is an incredible application offered to Mac users, be it on the computer, iPhone or iPod Touch.  Mental Case is a study tool based on the flashcard method you learned back in elementary school—and if you’ve ever tried to learn a new language.  The great thing about this application is its versatility as to what you want to study: Astronomy, Pharmacology, Expressions, Muscles, Turkish, Nouns, Sociology, History and most importantly Biblical Hebrew (and yes there’s Greek too).

Mental Case draws its resources from an online database from which you choose a subject to study.  Then multiple flashcard options (tpyically facets of the broader subject) appear and you simply click on one, you can then review the set if you like, and then downoad/sync for free to your Mac device.

So check it out!  I love it and continue to find it very useful and user-friendly.  (You can get a demo for 30 days on your comp if you’d like for free.  The app itself only costs $2.99.  Totally worth it!)

On Dogs, Women and Eating

So I’ve noticed that when my dog Bonzai gets real excited (mainly due to me walking in from work or playing tug-a-war with a toy) she takes a quick break, sprints to her food bowl, gorges and then returns to play.

I’ve noticed (or heard more so) that when girls become upset—they eat.

Isn’t it strange that when my dog gets really happy she eats, but when girls get sad they eat?

Just a thought.

“Let us be clear in our heads and warm in our hearts”

Whatever the reason for this tension that exists in so many people, my own experience, my awareness of the experience of others in history, and my understanding of the Bible teach me that it is neither a necessary tension nor a healthy one, at least not to the degree that most people experience it. My goal is to help us all become the kind of folk for whom sound thinking kindles deep feeling and for whom deep feeling motivates sound thinking. Most of the opposition we feel between the heart and the head is, I think, due to learned behavior patterns which do not necessarily result from the nature of our emotions or our thought. We have been warned so often about not becoming a cold intellectual that we have trouble imagining the possibility of intellect that lights fires instead of putting them out. Or on the other side we have been taught to be so wary of fanatic emotionalism that we can scarcely believe that a tear in someone’s eye might be coming from a holy syllogism instead of a pathological passion…Let us be clear in our heads and warm in our hearts.

-John Piper (for the whole sermon, click here)