Shortly after starting my pre medicine classes, financial issues required me to pull out. Unfortunately, my financial obligations were more pressing than my work-at-home job allowed for, and I was forced back into the world of full time work.

I’m now a full time web designer for a large company, and while it’s a fun job, I’m still ultimately disappointed that things came to an end so quickly after getting started. I want more than anything to become a physician, but for now, that dream is infeasible.

My goal right now is to pay off as much of our debt as possible in the hopes that I’ll be able to get things under control before I’m too old for all of this.

If you’re a man or woman of faith, I would greatly appreciate your prayers.

Last Friday was my first day to set foot on the Texas Tech campus as a student in over seven years. A lot of thought, discussion, and prayer has gone into this decision, but, as with any 31-year-old husband and father, there are so many variables in this equation that it’s impossible to think of them all. So, we’re forced to tackle some of them one-by-one as they show their ugly faces.

And several of them made themselves known over the last few days.

We haven’t given up hope yet, but my decision to go back to school has just become significantly more complex. Our ability to pay our current obligations (car payments, credit card bills, health insurance, etc.) has been impacted more than I had anticipated. Through a series of horrible financial decisions, we’ve dug ourselves a ditch that is becoming increasingly inescapable.

For now, I’m going to stay in class while we try to figure this out. But if we cannot figure it out soon, this journey may be terminated in its infancy.

The problem is that I have all three of my classes–Biology, Chemistry, and Physics–scheduled on the same day. And the problem is compounded by the fact that my wife and I are now down to one vehicle, so my wife will be dropping me off at school every day, and I won’t be able to leave any of my luggage in the car to swap out between classes.

So, as soon as I finish this post, I plan on logging onto the university website to see if I can’t get at least one of these classes shifted to Tuesday/Thursday. Maybe that will lighten my load enough so that I’ll only have to take one bag with me.

Either way, I cannot put into words how excited I am to finally be on the first leg of this journey. I’ve been wanting to take this step for over five years now, and thanks to the tremendous support of an amazing wife, I’m finally doing it!

If I have the wherewithal tomorrow, I’ll let everybody know how my first day went.

Today’s lunch break marks a significant point in my journey to become a physician. This morning, I received an email that my financial aid refund was in my account. So this afternoon, after lunch, I bought my first textbooks as a biology major. And now I’m $640 closer to being a doctor.

When I first started this blog, I was not honestly expecting to make it even this far. If you go back to my first post, you’ll see that all I had to hold onto was a faint hope that someday everything would just fall into place. As it turns out, it wasn’t hope that I needed. It was determination. And that determination didn’t really take hold until the day when my dear wife said, “Let’s do this!”

And now I’m on my way!

We have all been in arguments, political or otherwise, when we realized at some point that the other person was at least partially right. Unfortunately, however, our pride often gets the best of us and won’t let us admit that we might need to rethink things. In fact, we defy all semblance of logic and start fighting even harder to prove our point, and everything devolves into an unfortunate shouting match. If we could just get over ourselves and spend more time listening and less time talking, we might actually make some progress.

For example, why must liberals assume that anyone who opposes Obama’s brand of health care reform is greedy or intellectually inferior? And why must conservatives assume that liberals are all a bunch of amoral, socialist hippies who hate liberty? Is it possible, fellow Americans, that each side might actually have something constructive to say? Is it possible to put an end to the destructive bickering and pointless name-calling in an effort to discover what is best for the country?

Where there are people, disagreement is inevitable. And disagreement can be a healthy thing if we can all just learn to practice a little patience and humility. And who knows? We might even make some friends in the process.

Is it possible to escape the fatal consequences of a good principle? For myself I consider them inevitable.

~Alexis de Tocqueville, Memoir on Pauperism

Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young.

~Henry Ford