A little about me

My life I don't consider any special at all really, but I am grateful to God that He has allowed me it and it has been very wonderful. I think I'll start out at about 6 or 7, somewhere in that time bracket. I was living in Spokane WA and enjoying life. My dad was amazing, he did a fantastic job of loving my brother and I, meeting our needs and yet not spoiling us. He did everything with us and was always fun to be around and explained everything to us. He took the time to explain and show us things, which showed how much he cared for us. On a side note, I must say being not too wealthy was a unseen blessing, I'm understanding this all to well in my life now. My mom was awesome as well, loving and always there for us. I also have my sister who was in her teen years, but she was always great and I really appreciated her back then and who she is now (she has been a mother for over a year now). My grandma was also a big part of my family. She always had some fantastic ideas for birthday parties and for doing fun activities. I must say I love my family an enormous amount, glory and thanks be to God for his rich blessings! Some of the best memories I have was of fishing with my dad and brother, hanging out at home playing video games or sliding down the stairs in pillow cases, playing GI Joe's and setting up card shops and trading with my brother, listening to music with my sister, having mom make some great food for me, playing sports, saving up my money in an old stretched out sock I could use as a weapon, buying packs of baseball and basketball cards from the local card shop or Tidymens grocery store, boys night out at five mile pizza, and list could roll on. Like all families we had our problems and fights, but we all knew that we loved each other and that God was always with us and with everyone. Life was grand until one night when my parents told me that we were moving to Oregon to be closer to our relatives. I didn't like this very much, it meant giving up all that I was rooted in and traveling to another state. Rather then rant about all those details I'll just say it took a little bit for me to be ok with it, but it worked out great. Once we moved to Oregon I quickly got started finding more friends and getting to know people. It has always been easy for me to relate with people, but it is hard for me to really be close to people, due to my extreme love for individualism (we will talk about this later). I went through elementary school, then middle school, then high school. Pretty straight forward with probably your usual ups and downs. I played basketball, baseball, and did track through most of my easy school years. I was pretty good at all of them, but my true love were video games. You could definitely say I was addicted to them. This was fine with and would be fine with me still to this day, if it wasn't for Orthodoxy (again we will get into this later on a different post). All my friends in high school were hard core gamers as well. Countless hours were spent on Half-Life (a wide ray of mods, not just CS), EQ (ahhh sweet Evercrack, err Everquest), Diablo 2, and all the old school Nintendo and super Nintendo games you can think of. If you look at how my time as spent you could say that video gaming was my full time job, even during school. Despite this, I still managed to get a 3.9 GPA and do sports. With all of this God was pretty much removed from the picture. When I made it to college I was loving life. I had a great floor, a sweet roommate, good community, fun classes, etc. Everything you could want in a college life, right? Well towards the latter part of my first term (we were on semesters) I met my girl friend and that is when life got even better. Katie is amazing girl and I couldn't ever think of being without her. She has taught me so many things about myself, life, God, and numerous other subjects that I would have been clueless about. So things were going exceptionally well that first year. My second year was so-so by worldly standards, but my spiritual life flourished. I had devoted my life to God at right at the time I met Katie and now I was starting to put it into action. I was Baptised into the Orthodox Faith my sophomore year and that is when I took on all aspects of the ascetic life. Now it is summer and I'm going to be a Junior. I'm working on campus as well and battling one of the hardest things (along with all the regular life of an Orthodox Christian), video games. Truly my two masters are fighting for me. With this I will leave you for I am going to go do prayers. If any Christian (or anyone, God still listens to you) is reading this I recommend praying for at least 5 min. every night before you go to bed. You might just wake up a little more invigorated or happy, regardless God will be with you all the night long. Good night and God bless.