Alter Urgo: My New Blog

Hey! Jessie Urgo here.

It’s been quite a few years since I’ve updated the Praising Jesus blog, and it’s almost obsolete. I like to keep the blog up and running, though, and sometimes I stop by to smile and laugh at the writings of my preteen and early teen self.

I wanted to give a quick update. Now that I’m a college freshman, I’ve started a new blog, Alter Urgo, named after a joke I made about my alter ego/alter Urgo. I don’t post poetry on that blog, but I’m still focused on following Jesus and learning how to live a full and joyful life. As the tagline emphasizes, I write down my thoughts on “life, art, faith, creativity, and college.”

I’d love to see some of my old followers on this blog head over and check out my new blog. I’ve written about worrying about the future, learning to rest, becoming at home in college, and other struggles of my life. Just click on the photo above or head over to https://www.alterurgo.com/

A Framework for Inquiry–What’s Significant?

A quote, from Noam Chomsky (I don’t know who that is) on a site called Brain Pickings.

“You can’t pursue any kind of inquiry without a relatively clear framework that’s directing your search and helping you choose what’s significant and what isn’t… If you don’t have some sort of a framework for what matters — always, of course, with the provisor that you’re willing to question it if it seems to be going in the wrong direction — if you don’t have that, exploring the Internet is just picking out the random factoids that don’t mean anything… You have to know how to evaluate, interpret, and understand… The person who wins the Nobel Prize is not the person who read the most journal articles and took the most notes on them. It’s the person who knew what to look for. And cultivating that capacity to seek what’s significant, always willing to question whether you’re on the right track — that’s what education is going to be about, whether it’s using computers and the Internet, or pencil and paper, or books.”

Rainy Day at Sherando Lake

Today after church my family and another family met at Sherando Lake for a picnic and swimming. We ate our PB&J sandwiches, but then it began to rain. We hauled all our stuff into the shelter at Sherando Lake and waited fifteen or twenty minutes for the rain to subside. When the sun came back out, we moved all our stuff back out to the grass near the beach. Ten minutes later, it started pouring rain. We waited for two hours under the shelter.

A friend and I threw a Frisbee in the pouring rain. The grass was really squishy and once my friend, running after the Frisbee, slipped and fell on her backside in the mud. Oops. We didn’t run after the Frisbee as much after that.

There was one especially funny moment. A family was hurrying through the rain ahead of us on the path to the parking lot. It was a dad, a mom, and a little girl, about four or five. The dad was bald. He was covering his head with a boogie board. He turned around and said to his wife, “I don’t want to ruin my hair.”

Get it? That joke made my day.

A Joyful Fanatic

I want to be crazy for Christ,
Filled with His life,
Rejoicing in the Truth,
On the way to eternity glorifying Him,
And sharing the Good News.
They can call me crazy,
They can shun me all they want,
They can spit, they can call me
The stupidest person alive,
But I’m going to live for Christ.
I’ll shine with God’s light,
I’ll be victorious through His power in me,
Looking forward to the one hope.
An eternity of glorious life.

An Evening of Peace

It is a few hours after the rain.
The last of the blue-gray rain clouds
Have been spread like butter
High across the dome of sky.
The rich scents of exhaling soil
And a tangy whiff of grass
Hang in the air.
Birds croak and trill in neighbors’ trees
While a car swishes by,
And the steady slither and click
Of mom’s knitting needles
Marks the time calmly.

C. S. Lewis

There is a kind of happiness and wonder that makes you serious.