Monthly Archives: April 2016
by Jeremy Smith | Apr 30, 2016
“I know this sounds potentially ungrateful, but I don’t really know if I see my work as significant.”
by Heather Tills | Apr 29, 2016
I cannot help but think that we owe each other those small expressions of gratitude and that through them we are able, in small but meaningful ways, to break down these barriers that build up so easily in this life.
by Bekah (Williamson) Medendorp | Apr 28, 2016
They have entered the physical realm of the heaven but are too wrapped up in their own expectations to notice. They’ve allowed themselves to become too tainted with the promises of the world to recognize the promised land.
by Brad Zwiers | Apr 27, 2016
Drive south until you reach a Ruby Tuesdays up in flames. At this point, you’ll be approximately seven miles from a beautiful cabin in the Smoky Mountains, but it will take you two hours to get there.
by Nick Meekhof | Apr 26, 2016
Ohio is flat. Boring. Smoggy, smelly, and snooty. The cities sprawl into oblivion; legions of rusted warehouses and oily factories transition abruptly into very flat, very linear muck farms.
by Ryan Struyk | Apr 25, 2016
Welcome to 2016. Today, internships during college are becoming just as important – if not more important – than college classes and your GPA. Here are a few things I got right (and several I didn’t) and how to get what you want out of an internship.
by Lauren (Boersma) Harris | Apr 24, 2016
Grease is a overly-simplistic, stereotypical, peer-pressure-driven, youth-glorifying narrative, but on Wednesday, I remembered that it’s one of my all-time favorites.
by Michael Kelly | Apr 23, 2016
I don’t remember what age we grew too old for make believe, but it was somewhere around middle school. The next logical transition was video games, which are basically still make-believe games, but more socially acceptable.
by Matt Medendorp | Apr 22, 2016
The first time I read Travels With Charley I learned, with great delight, that Steinbeck freely admitted to being a terrible navigator.
by Andrew Orlebeke | Apr 21, 2016
As most students and recent graduates know, college tuition has skyrocketed in the past 10-15 years. Private school tuition has certainly trended upward, but it is public university tuition in which the difference has been really pronounced.
by Gabe Gunnink | Apr 20, 2016
I think that we must search out new pastures for play—Scottish dancing, Settlers of Catan, scuba-diving. When we begin to lose springiness in one area, we must seek it in another.
by Mary Margaret Healy | Apr 19, 2016
There isn’t some silver-bullet cure, some as-seen-on-TV solution that’s going to come into my accident-prone, easily distracted brain and take away the challenges of the life I want to live.
by Ben DeVries | Apr 18, 2016
During a Friday morning panel at the 2016 Festival of Faith and Writing in Grand Rapids, Michigan, writer Jessica Mesman Griffith said something that would later come to trouble me.
by Geneva Langeland | Apr 17, 2016
Turns out, you burn through a lot of episodes when campus is a forty-five-minute drive and twenty-minute walk away.
by Andrew Knot | Apr 16, 2016
In 2050, when the first histories of Germany’s integration project are written, the country will be graded on its efficacy in educating refugees in its native tongue.
by Cassie Westrate | Apr 15, 2016
Every time I have doubts, I ask myself where the line is between settling and compromising. Is this really not working? Are we really not right for each other? Or am I just unrealistic, idealistic, and CRAZY?
by Will Montei | Apr 14, 2016
My sister owned a copy of Hanson’s first album, “Middle of Nowhere,” that I loved to steal, along with her cream-colored boom box, and play on repeat while I circled the garage in rollerblades and sang along to words I didn’t really understand.
by Catherine Kramer | Apr 13, 2016
She is polite, she is professional. She has never met you before, and probably won’t interact with you outside of formal setting, or ever again.
by Abby Zwart | Apr 12, 2016
In training, we were taught to give specific words to people’s feelings, to say “devastating” instead of “sad” or “furious” instead of “angry.” But those are just fancy words for the fairly small and basic set of emotions we face as humans.
by Elaine Schnabel | Apr 11, 2016
Some people live in the past, but I prefer the future. When I slip into bed every night, I am waiting for the next good thing.
by Katie Van Zanen | Apr 10, 2016
The doctor asked me if I eat a balanced diet and exercise and I had to answer no on both counts. Banking. My health insurance coverage. I have no experience in shopping for used cars.
by Bart Tocci | Apr 9, 2016
Amazing. What utopia am I in? Is this what I’ve been missing at private school? Do all public schools work like this? You just walk into a party and someone comes up to you with a list of girls who want to make out? Unreal!
by Paul Menn | Apr 8, 2016
In the movies, there is usually a lone car horn blaring, the hiss of steam from a broken radiator, dramatic music swelling. None of that today. Just NPR on my car radio, and when I got out, an almost reverential silence.
by Caroline (Higgins) Nyczak | Apr 7, 2016
I also think you should know that I once used you, not by name (of course), as an illustration to my students. “Did you know,” I began, “that there are some people who know where I work and feel bad for me?”
by Josh deLacy | Apr 6, 2016
I don’t feel comfortable when people talk about God’s perfect plan, probably because I don’t believe in it.
by Alissa Anderson | Apr 5, 2016
I got the syllabus, and I saw something new: forty percent of my final grade in the class is “social media impact.”
by Ben Rietema | Apr 4, 2016
It was like asking the two of them to play a game of ping pong, but no one had brought any paddles and the only ball available was a brick.
by Sabrina Lee | Apr 3, 2016
At first, the concept of intelligent plants seemed a little far-fetched, or, rather, whimsical, a kind of wishful thinking that envisioned a magical world, rather Tolkein-esque.
by Jacob Schepers | Apr 2, 2016
We found a bike he fell in love with and, you guessed it, it’s pink and princess-emblazoned. He does not yet realize that this is not what is “expected” of him, and more power to him for it.
by Katerina Parsons | Apr 1, 2016
I remember being so overwhelmed and lost three months in. I can promise you—it gets better! How long have I been here? Almost a year, actually. Well, okay, six months. But coming up on a year.
