On a nine-hour plane ride back to the United States of America, I had the displeasure of sitting in front of the world-wide toddler’s seat-kicking brigade. As I endured my forced back “massage”, I reflected on my time beforehand. I was on my way home from a life-changing trip to the historical city of London where I had just completed my first college class.
Venture back to around March of this year. I remember sitting in Acuff Chapel (a part of the campus school) when a group of students from the college entered. They were dressed in rain gear with umbrellas in tow. They asked all of the applicants to the University to follow them to Shamblin for a “special program”. This special event turned out to be the unveiling of an exciting opportunity for campus school seniors. If Lipscomb was the final choice of your college, you would be invited to venture off to London, England at no expense to the traveler besides airfare. Also, three hours of credit would be granted after a small amount of academic work was completed. To be honest, the trip seemed like an opportunity that I could simply not pass up.
After a few months of preparation (including two meetings at the home of the Lowry’s), the “Lipscomb in London” group departed from Nashville, made a quick stop in Dallas to change planes, and were off to England. Once we arrived, jet lag – my arch nemesis for most of the trip – began to set in. Pushing on through this horrible feeling, we spent the next few days immersing ourselves in the city, the history, the culture, and all of the surroundings. It’s one thing to see pictures of Big Ben, the House of Parliament, the Globe Theater, and the Tower of London in history books and on television. To see these famed places in real life – it’s a feeling that’s hard to describe.
Besides the routine site-seeing, we attended a few famous plays, had extremely intellectual classes and had plenty of free time to ourselves where we could explore the city and get any souvenir shopping out of the way.
Personally, my favorite excursion came on the Tuesday of our journey. We ventured off to Oxford to listen to Dr. Michael Ward talk about his findings of the Narnia Code, a special in-text system of themes that C.S. Lewis hid within plot/character aspects of his stories in the Narnia series. Just saying I had my first official college lecture at Oxford is enough to make my jaw drop. Afterwards, I had a conversation with Dr. Ward that I will never forget. I love a good, intellectual conversation, and Dr. Ward was eager to feed my appetite.
I have truly only began to scratch the surface. The “Lipscomb in London” trip was an immense success for the upcoming freshmen. The trip gave us an opportunity to begin our college experience in a way that was totally different than many of our fellow classmates who had headed off to other universities. I hope the success of this trip allows for future trips to be made with upcoming freshmen from the high school who decide on Lipscomb. Dr. Lowry said that he wanted to take us “across the pond” before we ventured “across the parking lot”. This was a trip that I will never forget, and I consider myself blessed to have been given this opportunity by the university.