**wrote this last night and forgot to post it**

Two for today. Just trying to make Chad look bad again. Got home a little bit ago from seeing a Shakespeare play with my Shakespeare class. Really fun. This class has been such a surprise as I had been dreading it the first three years of undergrad. When it finally came my time to register for it the previous dreaded teacher left and, low and behold, one of the greatest teachers in the English department took it up. It has been one of the most fun classes I have been in in college, not to mention we have some of the best discussions. My teacher genuinely treats us like adults and I think really enjoys his job because - as evidenced in his superb teaching. He recently let us watch She's the Man, starring Amanda Bynes. This movie took up two class periods and is very loosely based upon Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. That being said, tonight we all went to see Twelfth Night. Beforehand we met at Dr. Yandell's house for pizza and improv. It is so funny sometimes that I am an English major. I don't really fit into any of the splinter groups within the major.

There are the artsy ones who really dwell on the abstract theories and performance associated with English. There are the future professors who become the go-to students for most current professors when they want to hear something enlightening. These people often use words that I have never heard before. There are the future lawyers and MBA students that tough it out for four years in undergrad in an attempt to set themselves apart from the traditional undergrad business degree. And then there are the future high school and middle school teachers. I am closest to these guys, though also partly identify with the business/law minds.

Back to my point. I don't really identify which was sort of evidenced tonight in my painful attempt at improv. I am not so much the creative or witty English major...but more the critical analytic one. Long tangent to make one point.

**Now Sunday's post**

Heading to the library. Just got home from church. Brian was talking about the messiness of Christmas this morning. He read the Christmas story or Jesus' birth in such a different way that was so refreshing. We are so often worried about cleaning up our lives before we let God come over..but God's own son Jesus was born into a mess. He was messy! Think about the virgin birth, Mary and Joseph's surprise, the undesirable shepherd's being the first to meet baby Jesus, and the baby Jesus being laid in a manger...a cow trough! Nothing messier than that. Jesus does not expect us to have our messy lives in order to have a relationship with him. His own purpose in coming to earth was not to clean things up! (Luke 12:51).

He will not make our lives peaceful, because we all have mess, but rather, He himself becomes peace for us.

"For he himself is our peace, who has made the two one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility [...]" Ephesians 2:14