A few weeks ago I hung out with Parker and had one of our usual sprawling conversations about life as a single thirty-something. The biggest chunk of it, of course, was about finding a girl. And if it wasn't difficult enough on its own, as professing Christians, we were looking for a Christian girl. Well, maybe. I think we had both gotten to the point where we were starting to ask whether even being a non-Christian was a deal-breaker.

Me: So I guess I could ask a non-Christian girl out. But what if it goes well? Then what?

He: I don't know.

I told him that I knew a strong Christian couple that had broken up because the girl had lost her faith. And he told me that he knew other couples that went through the same sort of thing. Initially I had seen that as a reminder of how important it is to find a strong Christian girl... But all these people were strong Christians at one point, and that didn't seem to help them. So does it make a difference?

A few weeks before that, Myung kept pushing me to ask out the cute barista at his Barnes. I was thisclose. Kind of random, considering I'd said maybe two words to her ever, and knew nothing about her, but he was pretty persistent ("She's nice. She works really hard, too."). So I was all ready to ask her out, but she'd finished her shift and left. But what if I had, and what if she'd said yes, and what if it went great, and what if I found out she wasn't a Christian? Then what? Keep going out? Try to convert her? Keep our religious beliefs separate? Be unable to connect with her about the one thing that moves my heart more than anything else in the world?

I don't know.

It seems like whenever I have a life question that I can't answer, I take a trip and things seem to clear up. Well, Parker said he could get a long weekend off at the same time as my vacation next month, and, at his insistence, LA, you'll be seeing me once again. I hope you have some answers, but I'll settle for good food.

The University of Illinois Fighting Illini basketball team has had a rough season. Picked by some as Big Ten championship contenders, they started the season ranked in the top 25 teams in the country. After lots of inconsistent play, they ended up in the middle of the Big Ten pack and got seeded in the lower half of the bracket for the NCAA tournament. Their first game pit them against UNLV, coached by Lon Kruger, U of I coach from 1996-2000.

Kruger was a good coach, ran a clean program, and left at the time for the NBA, hardly an unforgivable sin. Some Illini fans would still love to have him back, if only for the fact that he isn't Bruce Weber.

Weber is the current Illinois coach, who began his tenure auspiciously with a trip to the championship game in 2005, his second season. Since then his teams have been mired in mediocrity, only making the NCAA tournament twice the past four years, and not getting out of the first round.

But not this year. Illinois played about as well as it has played all year and beat UNLV by 11. It was a good win and took away some of the bitter taste from a disappointing season. Of course, a win in the next game would be the potential season-maker. The next opponent was Kansas, seeded first in the region and coached by Bill Self, the Illini head coach from 2000-2003.

Self was the prototypical new-era college coach: relatively young, handsome, energetic, charismatic, recruiting-savvy, on the verge of building a new sustained excellence. Illinois fans were smitten. Then he left - for a bigger name, better tradition, more money, maybe a less clingy fanbase. And while he's gone on to win a national championship and moved on in general, jilted Illinois fans have always wondered what could have been.

Weber has taken the brunt of the pent-up frustration, partly because he's the anti-Self, not producing on the court and not smooth enough off the court to make up for it. This could be his chance at a small but concentrated dose of redemption.

Some people have talked about this game as one that could make up for all the bad losses and poor play of the season. It's not surprising in the results-oriented arena of major college sports to think that a good run in the season-ending tournament can make up for a year of marginal effort, locker room infighting, and countless remote controls thrown across the room. But that's the way we sometimes think - where we end up is more important than the journey along the way.

Work permitting, I'll be watching the game. And it will mean something, but not everything, because I've been watching all along.

On Friday I got off work early and decided that I would check out the building workout room for the third time ever. The first time was when they showed me the building prior to moving in here, and the second time was during a fit of motivation around the beginning of last year. This time I'd been slowly working my way up to semi-fitness using a pair of dumbbells in the safety of my own living room. I decided that the time was right (or long overdue, whichever) to revisit the workout room.

I walked in and noticed that the place wasn't quite as nice as I'd remembered. There were three treadmills, a couple of ellipticals, an exercise bike, a handful of weight machines, and a rack of free weights in the corner - all in decent shape, but not without a tinge of dingy. I was the only one there and wandered around a bit, touching this and that, even squeezing out a few reps. I flipped through one of the magazines that they had in a rack and drank a cup of water from the cooler.

Then I stepped on a treadmill and pressed the start button. The machine groaned and the ground beneath my feet began falling back. Muscles that had long been dormant woke from their slumber and pushed me onward.

Daily, daily, to walk and run, and to push ever forward, even if sometimes it's only just to keep from falling back, to feel pain and - dare I say - suffering, and gaining strength in the midst of a weary race, daily, daily, one step closer, daily, to Thee.