Last Semester

Hello my dear family. I haven’t posted for a while, so I thought I would write about last semester especially because the past several months have been a time of great spiritual growth for me. The past two years or so I have been wrestling with much self doubt, and God has been faithfully and persistently teaching me to trust in Him. To understand last semester, however, I think that I should go back much farther.

I have struggled with self doubt from an early age. In fact, when I was in my preteens and early teens I would sometimes have tantrums if I didn’t think I was smart enough. Sometimes I would say that I was stupid, but my mom forbade me to call myself stupid and told me that I am fearfully and wonderfully made, which is true! Through my teenage years, however, God gently taught me to trust in Him and to put my identity in Christ–that is, to put my identity in the fact that I am a son of God by the blood of Christ and not in the degree of my intelligence or other abilities. I think that by the time I got to college I was standing on firm ground in this regard, and was not so easily swayed to despair if I did not do as well as I had wanted.

I think that by the time I began to study for my physics GRE, perhaps even earlier, self doubt had resurfaced and began to toss me about like the waves of the sea. I can see now that for the past two to three years I have been struggling with this self doubt–or perhaps drowning in self doubt might be a better description.

Over these years God has again been teaching me to trust in Him and to stand on his Word. He has been very gentle with me, but also forceful in that he has allowed me to see the dangers to which a lack of faith can lead; now, however, I feel like I am finally on firm ground again. I am excited about this next semester; I am excited about what God will do here at WashU and about what I will learn and how I will grow. I am also more excited about physics than I have been for a long time.

I will recount to you my understanding of how I have gotten from ‘there’ to here; but this post is already quite long, so I shall proceed to tell you about last semester in sections.