Prelude

All of my life I have been trying to avoid Idaho. A dry and desert land, I see it, void of all decent life and culture. Dwelling on the east coast in my younger years and relocating to Washington in the west to pass my adolescence, I have been ingrained with a negative but comical stereotype of all mid- westerners and "middlers" if you will. I have been made to imagine them: A bloated, middled-aged man, with his rifle in one hand and his all-controlling remote control in the other, sitting atop his camouflaged-reclining-with-a-bilt-in-mini-fridge-throne; his shirt folded up to allow his bearded beer belly to breath, his whiskers over-grown, his face eternally sunburned, his neck born red, one eye lazy and the other just works well enough to hunt down the big game of the season. Put simply, Idaho just never appealed to me. I do enjoy a good potato now and then but there are lots of other bulbed vegetables that can easily substitute it. The desert! It never exactly called to me, especially not after my first encounter with it blistered my lips and sunburned my face. It is certainly not my first pick even if it has "blossomed like a rose." And who ever said that God was a cowboy? That he created wide open spaces from the very start? This is clearly erroneous as we can hardly imagine the Garden of Eden as a wide open space, with its abundant produce growing at every which way, if God lives anywhere it certainly is not Wyoming! It is clearly my beloved Washington where he dwells- in the mystical mountain tops of the cascades, in her clear rivers where the salmon swim free, in the Seattle cityscape where the man-made metropolis meshes beautifully with mother nature- that is where God dwells.

So, when I applied to both Provo and Rexburg during my mission, I wasn't exactly looking forward to either one, however the subsidized costs and the undeniable goodness of an all LDS environment I could not resist, and so I went ahead. However, I did not write the required essays for the applications as I desired to focus on my missionary work, and my GPA was a little less than favorable, it was no surprise that BYU Provo denied my entrance and that BYU-I happily accepted me, even allowing me to enter immediately as a  returned missionary.  I studied out my option and prayed about it and received a clear answer that BYU-I was indeed the place for me to go. No battles a good battle that is won against the Lord, so I packed my bags, and prepared.

Brigham Young said "We have been kicked out of the frying-pan into the fire, out of the fire into the middle of the floor." Here I am, in the middle of the floor- and now? And now I am going to love it.  He closes: "and here we are and here we will stay." Here I am and here I will stay.

There is much to be learned in this world, and even more to see; I hope to brighten my view of the mid-west, and increase my respect for small towns. I hope to learn all that I can and do what I can to help others. All the while I will be loving Rexgurg.