Break is finished! I’ve already started my second semester of college and I have no idea where the time went! Wasn’t I just moving my stuff into Hart for the first time? Deciding where I should attend college? Learning to drive… learning to walk…?

Wherever my time went, God has used it to bring me here, for which I am thoroughly thankful.

New experiences, new mistakes

A new semester brings new classes, new decisions, and new growth. I was able to enjoy the “new classes” part when I crashed a class on the first day of the semester.

I walked into the large room, add/drop form in hand, and scanned the room for the professor. It was a Bible class, and I had heard many good things about this professor being the best to take for this class. I looked around for what I considered a typical Bible prof—old, mustached, bespectacled, perhaps even a bit rotund.

My eyes locked on a skinny man in a blue shirt up front playing with the microphone. With a broad, almost goofy, smile on his face he was cracking jokes into the microphone that only those in the front row could enjoy because his words kept getting lost as they came in and out of the speakers. A little put off that the prof was nowhere in sight, I stalked up to the skinny man and asked hesitantly, just in case, the first thing that popped into my head:

“Are you teaching this course?”

His smile widened even more and for a moment, the “No, your professor will be here shortly,” I was expecting looked like it was about to come. Instead, he said:

“Well… I’m going to try.”

I am an idiot.

Humbled with a little embarrassment at the fact that I couldn’t identify a well-known and no doubt superbly intelligent Bible professor at Biola, and also slightly taken aback that this thin, shaven, un-bespectacled and relatively young looking man was the professor everyone had told me about, I mumbled some acknowledgment and shoved my form forward for signing.

“Why are you signing in late?” He questioned light-heartedly as he pulled out a pen and examined the paper.

“The class was full,” I replied. “Do you think it’s ok for you to sign me in?”

“I hope so. Too late now,” he laughed, handing the signed paper back to me.
Pleased that I got into the class but a little abashed at the conversation, I found a seat next to my friend and did what little preparation I could for a class that I wasn’t even enrolled in yet.

Then I spent the next few minutes laughing at myself for asking such an unarticulated and thoughtless question to a professor.

Welcome back to Biola, Alyssa.