I hope that I don’t owe Dale Carnegie royalties or anything now.

So, now that I’ve discussed my day fitness-wise, we move on to the next portion of the day – meeting people.

I went to a church on Sunday morning, and while the people were nice there, I didn’t really get to know them that well. I’m definitely going to go back next week, because it’s not fair to them or myself to only give it one shot. But they didn’t have a Sunday evening service, which surprised me somewhat and lessened the overall appeal of the church to me. But maybe that’s just a summer thing. Anyway…

I’d been trying for a while now to find out if there was a Baptist Campus Ministries or something similar to it on the Florida campus. Of course, you all know that I loved my time at the UA BCM and that most of my best college friends are from there. So I hoped that there was one down here as well.

Well, I couldn’t find any information except for an e-mail address at first. I searched UF’s web site for all incarnations of “Baptist”, “BCM”, “BSU”, etc. No luck. Then I got wise and searched the online yellow pages. Bingo. I had a physical address. Luckily, it was on my side of the campus, so a bike ride to it wouldn’t prove any more difficult than one to campus itself. So I determined today to go and make myself known.

Now, those who know me well realize that I’m an introvert by nature, so it took a little while for me to pump myself up and do it. But I knew that life here will be a lot more fun if I actually knew some people, so buck up and smile, smile, smile, Brandon!

To make a long story short, it’s been a really good day for meeting people. Even though this is apparently finals week for the summer term here at UF, there were some people hanging around, and I got to know several of them. Of course, most of it was cursory “who are you, where are you from, what are you studying” information, but just being around people was something that I’d been missing, even though I’ve only been down here a week. I went to two different places for lunch with two sets of people, and got to know a couple pretty well. We ended up talking for an hour or so, mostly about football (imagine that, UA BCMers: football is a big topic here too!) Of course, I got kidded for my impeccable taste in teams; I’ve tried to console them by saying that at least Florida is my second-favorite team. I think that they want to convert me. Pray that I keep the faith. 🙂

Overall, everyone that I talked to seemed very friendly, and it wasn’t long before I started making mental connections between them and friends from UA. Tonight, I’m going to go to one of their apartments to watch a preseason NFL game.

So overall, things have gone really well today, and hopefully I’ve laid a foundation that will allow me to be immediately outgoing around the people at the UF BCM. If there’s one thing that I regretted about my time at the UA BCM, it was that I wasn’t very outgoing at the start. Hopefully, I’m taking this second chance and running with it.