Admissions Counselor: “Will you be attending Liberty in the Spring Semester?”
Me: “Well, like I’ve said before I’d love to, but it’s all about money”
Admissions Counselor: “Let’s pull up your account and see what you have. Ok, I see you have the Pell Grant, Pastor Scholarship, blah, blah, blah, etc. Your account shows that it would take $1,460 to come to Liberty this year.”
Me: “…”
Admissions Counselor: “Are you still there?”
*Side Note - Last semester it would have taken $5,000 for me to come since I couldn’t get extra loans.
Me: “Yes, sorry. $1,460 you said?
Admissions Counselor: “Yes, Sir”
Me: That’s amazing! I am seriously considering coming now. Let me check how much money I can get up and I’ll get back to you.”
Admissions Counselor: Ok, Have a nice day.”

So at this point I was going crazy since it was so low now. Unbeknownst to me, things were about to get even crazier. I went home to get on my computer to figure out why in the world it was so cheap for me. Liberty is a $10,000 a semester school so you can understand why I was so excited. When I logged onto my computer to see why it was so low, I just about fell out of the chair. Here it wasn’t $1,460… it was $666.25. I was floored. I called back and talked to my admissions counselor and she verified it. I also found out why it was so cheap.

Last semester I didn’t use my subsidized and unsubsidized federal loans so I called the school and told them. When I talked to someone from the admissions office (not my rep) they told me that I should try and ask if the school could keep the money from this semester and use it for next semester as well. She didn’t know if they would do it, but said it was worth a shot. I sent an email to Financial Aid (like the admissions counselor told me to) and explained the situation of them either sending the money back or keeping it for next semester. I heard no response until I got a letter in the mail asking me to notify why I wasn’t using the money and to send it to the loan company.

After that, I didn’t really think much of it. Not until now. When I added everything up, sure enough the money from last semester transferred over into this semester. Think of it as roll-over loans. So there’s my story for Liberty. I’m here and hopefully I’ll be staying for the next four years.

On the other side of how words can help, I have an affinity towards Wendy’s. I pass by them every night I drive home from work and after all, I can eat great even late! Although, I don’t see how a bacon cheeseburger and fries is eating great. I digress. I pulled around to get my #4 (Big Bacon Classic Meal) w/ Coke and the girl was taking a while putting my card through (Gotta love fast food that takes plastic!). She was cute and had some peircings in her lip and cheek and probably did not appreciate working in fast food this late. I had the thought to tell her that the food that I have received thus far has (mostly) been fresh and good and that they do a good job. She gives my card back and goes to hand me my food and she didn’t have a happy look on her face. This is what took place next…

Me: I just wanted to let you guys know that you do a great job, the foods always great.
Her: (Looks at me for a couple seconds then finally spitting out in disbelief) Really?
Me: Yeah.
Her: (A look on her face like she’s never heard a compliment before and is amazed that something good would come from a customer’s mouth) Thanks. =)
Me: Your Welcome. =) (Drive off)

Now I don’t know what effect that will have on her, but her expression alone made me happy. I worked in retail for several years and have come to understand that the customer often has a LOT of bad things to say and very few good things. Think about it, do people usually say anything when things are going fine and working properly? Not usually. I try to remember to call over manager’s at restaurant’s I go to when I have an outstanding meal and let them know. It is just as important to tell the manager the good meal you had just as much as when you have a bad meal. My challenge to whomever is reading this blog is to look for moments to go out of your way to be polite and nice to someone. You never know who’s life you’ll impact.

There’s a couple things to keep in mind. For one, I partition my drives. I like to have Windows on one partition, music on another partition, games on another, so on and so forth. This makes it easier when I need to wipe the drive of windows as I don’t lose my files that I’ve downloaded.

The second thing to keep in mind is I dual-boot. Dual-booting for those of you that don’t know is when you boot two operating systems from one hard drive. I dual-boot Ubuntu Linux and Windows XP. I am a big fan of Ubuntu and if you haven’t checked it out yet you really should. I will put links at the bottom of the post if your interested.

So anyway, I decided to format Windows. I booted up my 100% Legal version of Windows XP CD *cough* and formatted C:. I went through the procedure of installing Windows files on the hard drive so I could continue on to the second step of booting from the hard drive. Unfortunately this is as far as I got. Apparently, Windows didn’t like GRUB taking up the MBR and decided to overwrite it with it’s version of the MBR. It didn’t do this correctly. When I rebooted I was back at the first step. I went through this several more times before booting into the “System Recovery” tool to repair the MBR. When I “repaired” the MBR it erased my partitions (or so I thought).

At this point I was livid. I pulled my drive from my system and put it in my mom’s computer and verified that Windows didn’t recognize any partitions on my drive other than the one with Windows files. I downloaded a partition recovery program and luckily was able to recover my partitions. For those of you who are looking for a good program for that, use Partition Table Doctor, as it works quite well.

So, after all this I have been running Ubuntu’s LiveCD until my Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 comes and external hard drive enclosure. I will be taking my old hard drive and putting that in the external hard drive enclosure for my backup and using the new hard drive for my main system disk. The hard drive enclosure I’ll be using is the Vantec Nexstar 3 NST-360U2-BK. I’ll post an update when it all arrives.

I left a message on my Dad’s phone about the money I need for school and a couple day’s later he came to me and said he would try to get around $5,000 to start (since Liberty has a payment plan). A few days later I received a notice in the mail that another loan came through and I would owe $5,000. I was in bewilderment, but I knew it was confirmation that I am in the Lord’s will.
As of right now I am waiting on my Dad to see if he can get the money for school. For a while I wasn’t worried at all about the money. I guess I just didn’t think about it. Well, now it’s getting down to the wire and I am starting to worry a little bit. I need to keep my focus and constantly remind myself to “…not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present my requests to God.” Philippians 4:6. If you come across this post, please keep me in prayer that I keep on trusting God in all of this.

I got a guitar in August of ‘05 and started leading worship for my bible study in October. I really have enjoyed leading worship these past months and started to really consider what I was going to do with my life. As I mentioned previously, I have many passions, but I didn’t really know where to go with them to make a career out of one of them. I sat down and prayed and asked God what exactly it was I was supposed to be doing for my career. I knew I didn’t want to be trapped in a kitchen from previous opportunities along the cooking route. That really only left computers in my eyes until the music thing really started to grow inside me as a passion. I took some classes at Stockton, but it was just too expensive if I wasn’t going to be going full time.

It was around this time that I got the guitar. After leading worship for a bunch of months and praying I started to move forward by looking into college’s that had Worship Leading degree’s. There weren’t that many that I came across that offered specifically a Worship Leading degree. Many of the christian college’s offered music degrees, which is all fine and good, but I wanted specifically a Worship Leading degree. I finally came across Liberty University who offered a Worship Leading degree. So at the end of April, Pastor Craig, George, and I all went down to Lynchburg, VA to check it out. Being on campus and talking to the people I did, both Pastor Craig and I felt a real peace about me going to Liberty.

It was then that I decided to move forward and apply for school in the fall. It has been a rocky road getting in all the paper work that they requested (and I’m still not finished!), but it’s coming along. One thing that I do know is that with the Lord’s will, you just have to have the faith and courage to step out there and move forward. If it’s wrong for you to be doing something, he will shut the doors. The doors seem to be wide open as of now and I feel a real peace about going to school at Liberty.

So, that is the Liberty story so far. I will do my best to keep up to date on my goings on. Not that anybody is reading this. Hah.

So, I am going to Liberty University in the Fall. Hopefully. I am working hard to get in for the fall and all seems to be going well. I have gotten in my ACT scores, High School Transcripts, College Transcripts, and Essay. Right now I’m working on finalizing my FAFSA information with Liberty. I was in desperate need of cash so I could pay for Liberty’s $250 deposit and I’ve been praying about it. Today the Lord delivered. I was talking to Dick Haviland about my need and I’ve been doing work on his computer at REMAX. He wanted to pay me $100 rather than $50 so that I would have the money for the deposit. That was awesome. I then went to talk to PC at Beacon. He had talked with Pastor Pete about it earlier in the week and when I mentioned it to PC he went and talked with Pastor Al and got the other $150. Praise God! I will have to post some more later since it’s getting late, but I promise I will share more about what God is doing.