From My Train Ride...

I’ve been on this train for the past thirteen hours and this is the first time that I’m actually alone. We’re about three hours away from Oregon and about sixteen hours away from Portland, my home. It’s been a long time since I’ve been to Oregon. I left early on in the Summer to come down to California to spend some time with friends of our family and to start to move my things. There are many things that I don’t miss, like the constant rain. However, there are many things that I do miss, like my family and friends. I’ve met many wonderful people down here at Biola and made friends with them but I miss a lot of my friends back home. As I’m thinking of this I’m also thinking of Paul and how much he must have missed his friends. It seems like Paul was always either on the move or in prison and I can’t imagine how lonely he must have gotten at times. I’m sure he was comforted by many people (as well as the holy spirit) but with all that traveling, you tend to miss the people who matter most to you.
For the past two to three years I’ve thought a lot about my future and what I should do. God’s always had a funny way of revealing His plan for me. In the past it’s always started out as an idea and then through a series of events became more and more clear about what He wants me to do. Coming to Biola was a big one. I thought about Biola when I was in second grade. I had a teacher that is an alumni which sparked my interest. As I got older I still was interested in Biola but didn’t know what I wanted to do. It wasn’t until my sophomore year when I decided that I wanted to do something in film because of a class that I got randomly put in to. Shortly after that I found out about Biola’s CMA department and three years later, here I am.
Now, God is still revealing to me what he wants me to do in the future. I want to do missions work in Western Europe. This may seem like a random thing that I‘m talking about, but it has a point. If I were to move to Western Europe to do missions work I would be traveling all the time, working with different churches or groups…just like Paul. Philippians is meaningful to me because I want to travel as Paul did someday. And this book gives me an idea about the loneliness I may face.
I’m really enjoying this train ride. It’s over thirty hours long but it’s been beautiful. I woke up from a nap early on in the day to find that we were riding right along the coast. We’ve gone through mountains, went through the desert at sunset, and the stars are everywhere. I’ve done a lot of looking out the window while listening to music. I’ve been reading from CS Lewis’s The Four Loves mainly the part about friendship. I agree with Lewis when he talks about how strange friendship really is because it’s totally not necessary to live. Friendship (philia, φιλια) is a strong bond existing between people who share a common interest or activity. Lewis explicitly says that his definition of friendship is narrower than mere companionship: friendship in his sense only exists if there is something for the friendship to be "about". He calls Companionship a matrix for friendship, as friendship can rise in the context of both. Friendship is the least natural of loves, states Lewis; i.e., it is not biologically necessary to progeny like either affection (e.g., rearing a child), eros (e.g., creating a child), or charity (e.g., providing for a child). It has the least association with impulse or emotion. In spite of these characteristics, it was the belief of the ancients, (and Lewis himself), that it was the most admirable of loves because it looked not at the beloved (like eros), but towards that "about"--that thing because of which the relationship was formed. This freed the participants in this friendship from self-consciousness. Because the more they were looking towards something beyond or above themselves, the more those who were looking towards that thing with them were welcomed with the same sincerity, which freed the relationship from jealousy. And although the love may not be biologically necessary, it has, argued Lewis, civilization value. The thing beyond or above themselves may be of monumental importance to society. But without the benefit of friendship to blunt the loneliness of "being the only person who sees this", or the idea that two heads are better than one, many advances in society may never have been embarked upon. The relationship is by its nature selective, and therefore, exclusive. This characteristic is not detrimental per se, but the idea or goal towards which friends strive need not be altruistic. The innocuous ideas may simply be the cause of pseudo-aristocracies that ignore the legitimate cries of those outside their group; the malefic ones may be quite worse.
I've loved the time to relax and think about whatever God put on my mind. Friendship was the big topic that I was thinking about because I was going home to see my friends but I was also missing my new friends at Biola. I just liked that there was nothing I had to do and there was nobody around and how beautiful the train ride has been. I don’t know if there’s anything that I would’ve done differently. This was the first time I’ve ever done this and haven’t got distracted. I do this kind of thing every once in awhile and I know I’ll probably do it again. I enjoy being alone (not as much as I enjoy being around people) it’s a different kind of experience. There are so many times when I don’t really pay attention to what’s going on around me because I’ve got so much going on. It’s times like these when I can really just listen.