"Live your purpose."

Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.

C. S. Lewis 

I am so overly blessed by school that sometimes I can hardly keep my inspiration at bay. I attended a Christian school once before, from Kinder through 2nd grade, but spent the rest of my education in public school.

Which is why the contrast between the experience of my undergrad and my experience in graduate school thus far is so incredible. To have been immersed in a secular sphere and have to tiptoe around my faith, trying to figure out which battles to fight as well as finding the courage to do so or the humility to not was difficult and tiring.

More often than I would care to admit, I faltered. I compromised. I fled. And that isn't to say that it wouldn't have happened if I had stayed in a Christian school. Even I know the pitfalls of staying within a Christan bubble and I have seen the damage it has done to many of my friends. But it is to say that I faced the trial of many lonely days without much support and not knowing who I could really trust to be myself around.

Which led to my confusion over who I really was in general.

I stumbled around for years trying to get my bearings in life; constantly in flux between who I was on Friday and Sunday and who I was the rest of the week. And it wasn't until I graduated from high school that I was able to separate myself enough to start fresh.

My undergraduate years weren't any more filled with Christian brotherhood nor were they any less filled with religious intolerance. I mean, I'm a part of the generation that first voted on Prop 8, so I've been knee deep in the religion vs. morality argument for most of my life. But it's easier to remove yourself from the argument when you only see your peers twice a week and can submerge yourself in a church bubble.

So, when I started my Master's program and my Professors openly expressed their faith in class, one of them even praying that we would glorify God in all of our discussion and might seek to honor Him with all of our endeavors, I was moved. And I am continually moved.

Every day I go to school I am reminded of how much of a blessing going to a Christian school really is. For so long my beliefs have been ostracized from the classroom, often deemed unfit for academics because they are based on faith and not "accepted" fact. And even when they come into discussion  for whatever reason (an author's religious background, a time period's religious persecution etc.) they are often causes for scrutiny. A reason for their inadmissibility.

But at school now? At school we can actually address religion without crippling it. We do not, by any means, skew everything in favor of the church. We don't suddenly agree with the puritanism practiced in Hawthorne's novels or praise Harriet Beecher Stowe on her "good Christian morals". But we can look at their work in its entirety, including religion as a valid theme, and even learning something from it.

I find that the novels I once read in public school...they take on new meaning because I see them fully and am not afraid to bring up allusions to Christ that are present. Moreover, there is no one in class heckling me for bringing them up, saying that I only see them because I'm a Christian. I can be myself.

That's the biggest blessing I see from all of this. I can be completely and utterly myself.

A Christian. That loves the Lord. That strives to glorify Him with everything I do. Someone who wants to give that glory to Him and Him only. That's who I am.

Praise God.