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// March 31 [Thursday] 
// Story: Silver Glow's Journal 
// by Admiral Biscuit 
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March 31

The alarm on Meghan's telephone woke me up and it woke her up too. And if Peggy had been in the room, I bet it would have woken her up, as well.

I knew her telephone was still in her pants pocket, so I hopped out of bed and grabbed her pants so she wouldn’t have to crawl over me to get at it. I just handed them to her and she got her telephone out and pushed on the screen which made it stop, then she flopped back onto the pillow with her telephone still in her hand.

Since she wasn't showing any signs of wanting to get up right away, I got back in bed and put my head down on her chest. She reached out with the hand that wasn't holding the telephone and scratched behind my ear and I responded by nuzzling her breast, which made her giggle.

We lay like that until her alarm went off again and this time she said that she had probably ought to get going because she had to get ready for class. So I lifted up my head and before she could move I leaned down and kissed her on the lips, and she sort of stiffened in surprise but then kissed me back. Then I got out of bed so that she could get dressed and get to class on time.

Meghan sat up on the edge of the bed and pulled her pants on, got up and gathered the rest of her clothes. She sat on the bed to put on her socks and shoes, then pulled on her shirt and didn't bother wearing her bra.

I thanked her for taking me to see the movie, and she said it was a lot of fun, and when would I be coming over to watch the rest of the Harry Potter movies. I told her that I could come over tonight, if she didn't think that was watching too many movies all at once, and she said she didn't think it was.

I stood up on my hind legs and hugged her and then when she'd gone I got together my flight gear and zoomed around the sky for a while until my wings were sore, then I landed and trotted around the neighborhood until my legs were, too. It felt good to get that exercise in.

When I got back to the dorm, I pampered myself with a long shower again, then had a quick late breakfast and then I sat in my room and read Joshua until it was lunchtime. It said how the Gibeonites were afraid of the Isrealites (and for good reason) so they pretended that they lived far away and made a peace treaty, and when Joshua found out he was mad, but he kept his word and kept them safe.

Then they went to battle and defeated all the other towns and left none alive, because God told them to, and then they divided up the land among their clans. And in one battle God made the sun stand still so that they could see to keep fighting.

I had mixed feelings about the whole thing. I guess all the other tribes shouldn't have lived in land that God had promised to the Isrealites, but I didn't understand why He couldn't have just asked them to move. Or maybe He had, and they hadn't listened, and that was their punishment.

I just ducked into the dining hall long enough to grab a quick salad, 'cause I'd eaten breakfast late. Hopefully Peggy would want to go to Meijer this weekend so that I could get some more snacks and beer and shampoo. She'd probably be home tonight, and I could ask her then.

I was really eager to hear the rest of the poems in the debate, and I wasn't disappointed. Conrad started us off with Clancy of the Overflow, which was about a man named Clancy who herded sheep and nobody knew where he was. It was sort of like the sailors that come in and out of our harbor: the harbormaster keeps their mail, and when they're in port she gives it to them, and when they're out at sea nopony really knows where they are.

Then we read Banjo, of the Overflow, which made fun of the first poem and again said how miserable it was in the bush. I guess people aren't smart enough to sit under pine trees or bring tents for when it rains, or they make camps in low spots. I never once heard a sailorpony complain about getting wet.

I guess to people who are always accustomed to being inside, it must be bothersome. I've even seen cityponies run from the rain, as if it's going to melt them.

Mister Banjo didn't like all of that, so he wrote back that people who have settled into city life have gone soft, and gotten too accustomed to having all their comforts, and not having to do any work more difficult than move papers around and that sort of gave me pause because maybe one day that would be me, in charge of a weather sector and spending more time doing paperwork than actually flying. Maybe I would wind up like the old drover he wrote about.

But that wasn't so; I was just getting ideas from what he'd written. Lots of weathermares who were in charge got plenty of flight time in, and I could, too. I just had to be an active team leader.

Mister Lawson thought so, too. He wrote a poem called The Poets of the Tomb, and I could kind of tell by the tone of the poem that Mister Banjo's prodding had gotten to him just a little bit. Conrad had started reading it to set the tone, and then he gave it to Trevor next, and I got to read the last stanza.

It was interesting that he wasn't really talking about the bush specifically, but instead talking about people as a whole. And when Mister Banjo replied, it was almost an apology for having such strong feelings.

I got the sense that he was regretful that he had wasted his youth and was now an old man out of place, but I thought he was being too hard on himself. And I kind of wondered if Conrad ever thought that way, 'cause he was really old. Were there things that he wished he'd done when he was younger that he never had?

I suppose everybody winds up having those regrets.

At the end of class, Conrad told us that we'd be moving to a different continent next week, but he wouldn't say who we were studying.

I had the afternoon free, until I had my meeting with Liz, so I went to my dorm room and got my copy of Coming of Age in Samoa and sat down on the bed and started to read it, then I thought about what Mister Lawson and Mister Banjo had said about settling in, so I took my book outside and sat on a thick tree branch and read it there. It was a little bit chilly, especially since I'd gotten trimmed, but not too uncomfortable. The sun kept me warm, and of course keeping my wings out just a little bit helped hold in a lot of body heat.

After dinner, I went to meet with Liz, and first she asked me if I had enjoyed the Easter service, and I told her that I had. And then I apologized for being so slow at reading the Bible but there was always so much going on that it was easy to forget, and she said that it was okay, most Christians hadn't read it either. But she said that most people in America were raised with at least a basic understanding of some of the stories, and I didn't have any of that, and that she thought that perhaps it would be better to have me take my time reading it from the beginning and coming to my own conclusions, rather than have somebody telling me what I ought to think.

So I told her what I thought about how people were really bad at following God's rules, and that He was mean to them because of that. And I said that I'd been thinking about it a bit and how she'd told me that it was better to make free choices, even if they were bad choices, than to be slaves.

I said that it bothered me how angry He got sometimes, and how He had flooded the whole world and told the Isrealites that they could have land that somebody else already had, and that they should kill everyone. Especially since He wasn't mad that the Gibeonites made a peace treaty, even though they'd lied in order to get it.

Liz told me that she could understand why that bothered me, and she said that it bothered a lot of people. She said that after the Old Testament, God had sent Jesus down to make a new covenant with the people, and that some of the laws of the Old Testament had been changed as a result, and that Christianity ought to be about love.

She also told me that different people had different beliefs in the Bible. Some people thought that some of it was symbolism, like the creation story or the great flood, and other people thought that there was one specific version of the Bible that was absolutely God's word and that everything the Bible said had happened was true.

She said that one part that was currently being argued about was gay marriage and gay rights. In the Old Testament, it very specifically said that was against the rules, but Jesus struck down many of the old rules with His new covenant, so some churches felt it was okay for gay people to marry and others didn't think it was.

I asked her what she thought about it, and she said, “For there are these three things that endure: Faith, Hope, and Love, but the greatest of these is Love.” Then she hugged me and I promised to read more of the Bible before next week.

I thought about that as I was walking over to DeWaters.  I guess our history hasn’t always been pleasant, either, because we didn’t always have a wise pony like Princess Celestia to tell us what to do.  And there was a lot of time before she came where it was pretty bad and all the tribes were constantly fighting with each other, and among ourselves, too.  So I ought to keep an open mind, because I thought what Liz was saying was that God learned that people couldn’t follow hard rules.

Meghan and I made popcorn and watched the third Harry Potter movie together.  It felt darker than the first two I’d seen, but I was glad that they figured out how to save Buckbeak, even if they had to time travel, which is very dangerous I’ve heard.  Harry is kind of dumb sometimes, but I think that’s just because he’s a boy.  He’s lucky that Hermione is smart enough to help him figure things out.

I told Meghan that I had to be up early for class, so I should go back to my room, but she said that she’d set her phone alarm and asked what time I wanted to get up.  I said that I shouldn’t need it; I woke up pretty reliably at dawn without an alarm, but I didn’t want to disturb her when I got up and she said that I wouldn’t, so she went into the bathroom to get dressed which was kind of disappointing but I guess it’s not nice to be naked around your roommate.  

I let Meghan take the wall-side of the bed so that I wouldn’t disturb her when I got up, and then I settled into bed and snuggled up against her.