Visions

Every day at the end of class, Dr. Finitsis gives us a blog topic. It's just the title or topic, and then we get to come up with the rest. Today, it was "visions." We had just finished reading through Daniel 7-12, in which the author writes about a series of visions he has dealing with the end of the world. So, in that context, the title made sense. But trying to come up with a topic for it was a lot harder than I thought.

Normally we walk through Athens, taking pictures of buildings, people, graffiti, etc. But today, we went to the Acropolis Museum. It's a three-story complex filled with pots, sculptures, and different forms of art that were from the Acropolis. Now, I'm a complete museum nut. I love going to a museum for a day, looking around at everything, reading all the little descriptive signs

that say what the object is that you're looking at and how it's important. This is what I was truly looking forward to with the trip.

Before we even stepped into the museum, we stopped outside and Finitsis showed us a section of the ground covered with glass. We've been told that if you dig anywhere in Athens you'll find some sort of ancient ruins. Well, the museum had dug underneath where the actual building was and uncovered this huge expanse of ancient city. You could see houses, places that looked like wells, different buildings. I could almost imagine seeing people walking around, living in the houses, just having normal everyday lives like we have today.

All throughout the exhibits, it struck me how we're idolizing their pots and pencils and handles to jars. These are their everyday things that people used 25oo years ago. It's almost like going through the exhibits you're learning about who the people are, not necessarily what wars were fought and who conquered who. We're learning about their religion, their family life, the ways they were educated. And then I realized that this is almost like getting a vision into the past, an opportunity to look back at a group of amazing people who have founded so much of the world we know today.

I don't know how many other people are history nuts like me. I just love learning about this kind of stuff, and if I was given the opportunity to go and discover more artifacts, I would do it in a heartbeat. I guess the vision I had is more of looking into the past instead of the future. Which is what a lot of people think the author of Daniel did when he was writing down the prophecies. It's kinda cool how this all connects :)