It's difficult to believe that we are only 1 day away from spring break, which means 1 day away from leaving on a jet plane to the Dominican Republic! I can't wait. Praise God I have gotten all my support in, and from the sound of the other people on my team, it looks like we're going to be just fine. I think we are all ready to leave, assuming nothing crazy comes up in the next few days. I wonder how quickly I'll be able to pick up on evangelism again, considering I haven't really done it in nearly a year. Enough with the DR right now, I suppose I'll give an update on this year/semester so far.
On January 1st, I was stoked on life and everything God had blessed me with. His joy definitely captivated me and it was fantastic. I had just finished the Chronicles of Narnia and The Shack, which made me rethink the way I viewed God a little bit. This joy gave me a passion for the Lord that lasted beyond a day or two; His joy was consuming my life until a little incident that occurred on January 31st, 2010...
You may not know this about me (if you know me at all, you probably know it), but I really enjoy snowboarding. Like kind of obsessed with snowboarding. Anyways, on January 31st, I was happily snowboarding up at June Mountain with some of my friends. I was trying to push my limits in the terrain park, so in the middle of the morning I went through the halfpipe few times and had a great time. However, there were several rather large jumps that I wanted to conquer. A couple of my friends knew I had the skills to take these jumps and hence convinced me that we couldn't go to lunch until I jumped. I psyched myself up, charged the jump, and.....chickened out. I was frustrated, but we went back up the chair so I could actually do it. The second time I was ready. I went for the jump at full speed, and flew....
The second I flew off the jump I knew it was going to be bad news. Before I took off the jump, I tried speed-checking which caused me to shoot my board out from under me. As I swung my arms in a futile attempt at correcting my fall, my board continued to become parallel to my body, so when I finally hit the ground near the bottom of the land, my point of impact was approximately the middle of my back. Needless to say, I was hurting pretty bad, but I thought I would be able to get up in a minute or two. After like 30 seconds of not being able to breathe (wind got knocked out of me) and several minutes of lying on my back, I knew I needed ski patrol. Once ski patrol got there, they checked me out, put me on a spine board, drove me down to the ski patrol room, rode me down to the paramedics, drove me to the Mammoth hospital, and laid me in a hospital bed. After lying in that bed for ages, took some x-rays, waited some more, then took more x-rays, and then waited for the doctor.
"Well it looks like you have a compression fracture. A T6 compression fracture to be exact." Wow. Never thought I would be hearing from a doctor that I broke my back. It's a miracle from God that I wasn't paralyzed or worse. After giving me some drugs and a back brace, the doctor sent me on my way and told me to have a spine doctor check me out in a few days.
It's definitely slowed me down until May 1st (I can take my brace off), but it has been so good and allowed me to focus on my friends and growing closer to the Lord instead of figuring out next time I could go snowboarding. Needless to say, breaking my back has been a defining aspect of this semester.
the rest of my semester has been fantastic! I've been taking it easy and spending a lot of time with God. AGO has been running well, and working with Team Awesome at 727 (the weekly meeting of CRU) is, well, awesome. I could probably talk about a lot more parts of my life right now, but this post is already long enough. More updates will come. Hopefully I can write a short post while I'm in The Dominican Republic.
Philippians 4:4-6
In the meantime, here is the video of my jump. Epic, right?
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