I feel good.  I feel great.  I feel wonderful.

While Bob Wiley wasn't exactly feeling good, great or wonderful when he said those words, I am.  I really do feel good, great, and yes, even wonderful.

Once upon a time (sometime between Monday and Wednesday of last week), I was really worried about the recent changes taking place in my life.  New apartment, new classes, new school year--all that jazz.  I was worried about my class schedule, particularly involving an Honors Literature class and a Spanish 205 class.  The Honors Lit class worried me because although it sounded like an awesome class, the booklist was 14 books long.  My assignment between Tuesday and Thursday was to read a novel, and although I am an English major, that still frightened me.  (I think some people expect English majors to possess superhuman reading and writing skills...To these people I say, "Ha! No.") I was worried about Spanish because there were two classes I was trying to get into; both classes seemed very undesirable, respectively, but I had to take Spanish so I just needed to make a decision.  

Fortunately, I have emerged from these problems successfully.  Although my C.S. Lewis class has already significantly influenced the amount of reading I do each week--I have read 3 novels since Wednesday--I do not regret it one bit.  The novels have been inspiring and insightful, and so have the lectures.  I can already tell this is going to be a class that will influence me for quite a while longer than one semester.

And, even though the Spanish class didn't really work out how I imagined--I think what I imagined was something easy, not time consuming, and very convenient. Ha--I think it has put me in the best possible Spanish place.

Here is one of many gems I have already gleaned from my C.S. Lewis class:

In The Screwtape Letters, a devil named Screwtape writes several letters to his nephew, trying to explain how best to tempt his human subject away from God.  The book gives very interesting insight into how Satan tries to tempt us, but it also gives spiritual insight into the nature of God.  I loved this book.  With every page I found something new to underline, and I was constantly thinking, "C.S. Lewis was secretly LDS. There's no other explanation for how so much of his philosophy coincides with Mormon doctrine." One of my favorite themes in the book is that while God loves us and wants us to succeed, Screwtape cannot understand that love.  He says,

The truth is I slipped by mere carelessness into saying that the Enemy (meaning God) really loves the humans.  That, of course, is an impossibility.  He is one being, they are distinct from Him.  Their good cannot be His.  All His talk about Love must be a disguise for something else--He must have some real motive for creating them and taking so much trouble about them.  The reason one comes to talk as if He really had this impossible Love is our utter failure to find out that real motive.  What does He stand to make out of them?

As I read that passage, I can see the reasoning behind Screwtape's last sentence: What does He stand to make out of them?  Sometimes I look at myself and wonder the same thing.  What does he stand to make out of us, especially compared with Him? When I ask myself why He would even bother, the answer is deceivingly simple: love.  God simply (and yet infinitely) loves us.  That is all.  But that simple truth makes my life mean something.

It is for this reason that I feel good, great and wonderful.  I have read plenty of novels for my English major, and I can confidently say that I have never come to that conclusion at the end of one.  And that's only one of the many gems.  Ahh. Life is good :-)