This morning after my first discussion, I went and rented a locker for two months at the ARC. Now I don't have to carry my shoes and workout stuff around everywhere, and hopefully I'll be more willing to spend time exercising. It was also my first time playing basketball. I'm going to start that back up.

One of the main reasons I havn't played much basketball recently is the fear of two specific injuries I always used to suffer. First, the nails on my fingers would sometimes get hit with the ball, causing them to pry up a tiny bit and hurt for a long time. The second reasons was that I constantly suffered twisted ankles while playing basketball. Today I joined a game with first and second year students from the Graduate School of Management. Many of them were extremely tall, but the games still went very well. Considering the fact that I hadn't played basketball in ages, I think I did pretty well. My shooting is better than it's ever been, which is strange, because I used to practice so much more. Basketball is fun.

When lunchtime came around, I went straight for the ARC ballroom, where NASA astronaut Steve Robinson was going to give a special lecture. A few months ago, he gained national and international attention when he flew on the space shuttle Discovery and became the first person ever to perform an in-flight repair of a space shuttle. During that time, I was actually following the shuttles progress on cnn and read about him multiple times.

I got to the ballroom ahead of the crowd, and got a seat in the second row directly behind all the reserved seats. Turns out, they were probably the best seats in the house. After finalizing some things behind the podium, Steve came and sat down in the seat directly in front of me. I could have reached out and easily tapped on his shoulder. There were two students sitting to my left who watched my backpack for a few minutes at the very beginning while I got some cookies. I convinced one of them to give me a thumbs up right behind Mr. Robinson.

The lecture was the most interesting one and a half hours I've experienced since coming to UCD. It was amazing to think that the the man talking to us was actually floating around in space and in the international space station just a few months ago. A few times during the talk I actually laughed out loud. He showed us a super long home video, which included the inside of the shuttle, the inside of the space station, the astronauts at work, everyone fooling around, and a lot more interesting insights. A scene that was really funny was the astronauts having fun by using their tools the wrong way. There was a massive tool that resembled a giant screwdriver, and the captain of the flight held onto it and spun around in zero gravity while another crewmember held it for her. He also mentioned how one of the crew members was short, and that they could leave her floating in the center of a module and strand her that way.

During the talk this occurred to me:

No matter how respectable or accomplished people are, they're still ordinary sinful people like the rest of us. Though it was amazing listening to the wonderful experiences Steve shared with us, if he doesn't trust in Christ in his lifetime, he'll end up accomplishing nothing.

Moving on.

Before entering the ballroom, we submitted tickets into a bowl for a movie ticket raffle. It was for the Tom Hanks space movie showing at the i-max theater, tonight. There was six opportunities to win them, but I probably wouldn't have been able to go anyway. I had class, and then I went to Grace Alive.

Which brings me to my next and final thought for the day...

I've decided to choose Grace Alive as my fellowship, and Grace Valley as the church I'll be attending on Sundays. That definitely goes against what most people were probably expecting, even myself. For most of my weeks spent thinking, praying, and talking about it, I was pretty convinced I would eventually choose absk and berkland. Since I knew that both fellowships and churches were strong, I prayed that I would have peace in my heart with the choice that I would make.

Multiple times, I thought for sure that I was going to decide ABSK, but I was never fully at peace with my decision... When I finally gave grace alive more attention and thought, I felt much better about it as a choice. Finally, I contacted the super nice absk leader Lem yesterday, and told him I had settled on Grace Alive. Instead of him encouraging me to check their fellowship out more, like I expected, he responded with words of encouragement.

Praise God. His love and faithful to us are never ending.