Colorado: Day 5

Tuesday was a bad day for me. While everyone got up, had devotionals and breakfast and met as a group, I was sick in bed. I woke up in the middle of the night shivering and then sweating, and decided not to meet with the group that morning. I got a couple more hours of sleep before I pulled myself up and got around for the day. After a few minutes of sitting in the Horizons house's wonderful couch room, the group came back from meeting and praying. We all sat in the couch room, reading articles about Islam and Christianity before we had lunch. I was drifting to sleep while everyone else was reading, and apparently, Seth was too.

After lunch, the group left to go for a hike in the mountains, led by Jacob and Tom. I decided not to go since I was still sick, and sat in the couch room reading the first chapter of Rob Bell's Velvet Elvis. The group seemed to have a very nice, if exhausting hike. The pictures they took are some of the best of the week. They seemed to have had a good time.

After they came back, most of the group took naps and cleaned up. We met in the lecture room and talked about the speaker that we would be going to later. Then we prayed for God to lead us at the University that night. We had dinner, (I think it was beef brisket that night) and left for CU.

The speaker that night was the mother of the president of the CU Muslim Student Association, or MSA. She referred to herself as a White Anglo-Saxon Muslim. She had attended CU years ago converted to Islam from Christianity. She met her husband at the University and had eight children with him. Much of her talk dealt with how people perceived her and treated her and what it was like being a white, converted Muslim. Her theme echoed the previous night's panel's theme of "we can all get along". It was interesting to hear a full story of a Muslim's conversion, but she was not the greatest of speakers.

Afterward, we met a lot of people and had some very good conversations with them. Jim, Chelsea and I met a man named Ahmed from Egypt. He worked for a television studio in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates running a show called Third Eye. It is a documentary show that has some very intriguing topics. They were filming Islamic Awareness Week for an episode called "Muslims in America". He was a very interesting and nice guy that we kept up with as the week went on.

We trekked back to the Horizons house and met as a group to talk about our experiences and thoughts on that night before praying and heading for bed.