Midyear Defense paper - June 11, 2010

My Honor Academy Experience So Far

Preparing for my midyear defense really opened my eyes to a lot of things. I feel like I have wasted a lot of time because this has been the first time I have really sat down to reflect on my year. In a way, just preparing for this defense has been a Life Transforming Event in itself. I say this because I have had serious revelations that past week or so as I was trying to come up with ideas to share what God has taught me this year. I didn’t want it to be fake, so I just started thinking and God gave me visual representations on some of the things I’ve learned. That is where a lot of my defense comes from. I turned the visions he put in my head into artwork to illustrate what I’ve learned. One of the pieces that I did is an image of a girl standing on a beach. This is symbolic for how I feel about discovering God. I used to be almost discouraged knowing that I will never know everything about who God is or all of His Characteristics, but know I look at it as if I were exploring the ocean. Every new discovery is exciting and opens up new doors to our understanding. That’s what it feels like to me when I think of discovering God. I will never know all there is to know, but trying will be the best adventure I could hope for. The rest of the artwork that I did talks about what I was struggling with in the past, what God has taught me, what I still struggle with and what my life is like now. Yet, with all the artwork aside, I think the most important thing I have learned this past week, while preparing, is why God wants me here now, and what His purpose is for having me on this campus during this time. I need to pray. Pray about sins being committed on campus, about sexual immorality and hatred of one another, about un-forgiveness and the lack of love. I need to pray against complacency and so much more as well. I believe that God is preparing me for something big in the future, but He revealed to me that I have a huge purpose right now as well. He spoke to me saying, “You’re heart cries about this for a reason, you are supposed to do something about it. Don’t you see? That is why I called you here, for this season, to pray and be an interceder!” That revelation hit home. I intend to fulfill that purpose.