a bit of perspective

phew, what a day!

it started off like any old monday. i was exhausted as usual since I normally mess up my sleep schedule on the weekends by staying up late. Went to my first class where we were supposed to editing our videos based on children's books. We upload our footage then UH-OH, realize that we had completely taped over the first scene with the second scene. Somehow during our filming on friday, I accidentally rewound the tape to the beginning and we taped over the first filming session.
yeah that was a bummer. So we had to go BACK to the Laundromat and shoot all over again.

finally the class day goes on and is as boring as ever. get to math and eat my chicken tortilla wrap from the library cafe - yum! we go through math class and then have our break before reading. reading is 2 hours long and comes at just the point in the day where you are about to fall asleep at the drop of a hat. today was no exception.

at about 20 minutes till the end of class my friend Nathan got a text from the new safety update text messaging system that we now have after VT and NIU. he goes to check his e-mail to get more details and comes in and whispers to our table that there was a masked gunman at app south apartments and that he was now possibly on campus. talk about a distraction! nathan raised his hand to tell our professor and did and our prof basically didn't give it much attention.

yeah no one could focus for that last 20 minutes. I mean really now, we had no clue what was really going on. so we finally get out and I start to wonder if I should go home or not. the area of campus they were telling us to stay away from is exactly where the bus goes to take me home.

I found my friends angel and heather in the ed building and we discuss what we know. heather is supposed to be getting in a van at 5 to go to a class thing and is trying to talk to her professor about if they are still doing it or not. angel had class at 6 but was going to wait in the ed building until she knew what was going on. So angel and I stayed in the mac lab and waited. it was so confusing because they were telling us to be safe and stay away from that area of campus but we weren't under an official "lockdown". so we waited.

finally at 5:10 we went into official lockdown mode. the girl working in the media lab had me go ask downstairs in the c&i office about what we should do. a lady found me in the stairwell and said that they were locking all of the outside doors and that we should stay in the computer lab and lock that door as well. the man in charge of that media lab came by and said to stay there and to not let anyone in.

so for almost 2 hours we sat in there. really it was a pretty good place to be stuck because there were plenty of computers and we were watching the news on TV. the only bad thing was that my phone was dead and i couldn't get service out on angel's cell. we think that all of the towers were busy.

I did realize that I should probably try to let my parents and people know that I was ok so I remembered the power of facebook. I messaged my friend Laura and had her call the parents to pass on the message which was a big help! And then I was able to message and/or IM my roommate and other people to make sure that friends were ok and in safe places.

Overall nothing awful happened which is a blessing. No one was hurt or injured and really it was just a guy trying to rob some places and make money. The thing was he did have a gun so we may never know what he was planning on doing to get said money or whatever.

When I finally made it home I was hungry and exhausted. But after thinking about it I realized how much I tend to dwell on the small things and lose sight of what matters most: God, family, and friends. I started to talk to my heavenly Father about this, praising Him that everyone was ok. I realized that worrying about our project earlier and stressing over some other school stuff really doesn't matter in the end. It was a bit of a scary/nerve-wracking couple of hours and God really reminded me tonight that I need to constantly look to Him for safety and security and trust that He has a plan.