Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing
(John Wyeth)

Come, Thou fount of every blessing,
Tune my heart to sing Thy grace.
Streams of mercy, never ceasing,
Call for songs of loudest praise.
Teach me some melodious sonnet,
Sung by flaming tongues above;
Praise His name, I'm fixed upon it,
Name of God's redeeming love.

Hitherto, Thy love has blessed me,
Thou hast drawn me to this place.
And I know Thy hand will lead me,
Safely home by Thy good grace.
Jesus sought me when a stranger,
Wandering from the fold of God;
He to rescue me from danger,
Bought me with His precious blood.

O to grace, how great a debtor,
Daily I'm constrained to be.
Let Thy goodness, like a fetter,
Bind my wandering heart to Thee.
Prone to wander, Lord I feel it,
Prone to leave the God I love;
Here's my heart, O take and seal it,
Seal it for Thy courts above.

the leaves outside are SO beautiful. so i collected come today, while i was on the phone outside of the library.

it's been a good week since fall break ended. fall break was so refreshing, and so fun, that i really felt prepared to come back to school and take on all...three...of my classes. yeah, i know. slacker semester. but i love it, and don't know how i'll go back to more next semester. we start advising for next semester really soon! we hardly get started on one semester before we've got to plan the next one. time goes too fast.

small groups tonight. have i said how much i love my girls??

it's the weekend. it's the weekend. oh yeah. it's the weekend.

had an adventure this afternoon. bonnie and i went running...for eight minutes, when we saw an awesome free couch, so we raced back, grabbed some guys, and brought it back. i'm back now, getting ready for tonight when i've got to usher, but they're still at bonnie's apartment, trying to get the darn thing through the door. they had already taken one door off its hinges and put it back on by the time i had to leave the fray. too bad -- i wanted to see the resolution to our quest.

must go get ready.

i'm back! fall break was great -- lots of sleep, relaxation, and healthy living. =] haha, no seriously. bonnie, andrea, and heidi, i love you girls!

heidi lives in a great area of paths and trees and a lake, so there were lots of walks. we even drove over to a forest preserve one day and went running. it was beautiful. now we'll never be satisfied with the prairie path again. monday evening we went to the theatre and saw Elizabethtown. two thumbs up and as many stars as are possible. i'd recommend it to anyone who likes the garden state vein of movies. and people who are just a little bit sappy.

slept through my alarm this morning. as in, at some point i slept through an entire minute of annoying beeping noises. even my roommates in the other room heard it, and thought i'd already left or something. i don't really understand, since this weekend was all about sleep and since i went to bed last night at eleven, but...guess i needed it? that's always a good excuse.

so i just walked from my bedroom through the living room and to the kitchen, and was totally STRUCK with the weirdest feeling of --wow-- i'm here, college, my life has been crazy, look where God has brought me, and now these girls i'm living with -- how did we get to know each other? and isn't life crazy how people are brought together? and what the crap will the future hold, and i'm living in an apartment in my junior year of college, and...

that's just crazy. weird feeling. i guess i'm just sleep deprived.

well, friends, it's finished! an update on the paper/final:

definitely had ADHD yesterday. couldn't concentrate for the life of me. by the time small group rolled around at 9pm i had two pages out of a minimum of eight. so went to dsg. i was glad that jenna and i decided that our group would just carve pumkins and do something stress relieving last night. it's finals/midterms week, after all! so we did that for a LONG time, and it was wonderful being with those girls. got back, and by the time i had to go to bed at 1:30 something am (i make an awful night person), i think i had about five pages. meant to get up this morning at 6, but i was practically paralyzed, so i did manage to get up at 6:30, and i worked and worked and drank coffee (bad coffee too) and worked, skipped my 8:30 class, and worked...and finally finished with enough time to get dressed and run to the class that had the paper and a final today. all that to say that i DID NOT STUDY ONE BIT for my final exam. not one iota. i've never done that before. want to know the great thing? it wouldn't have helped. it was hilarious. everyone in the class was like, what the crap?! 20 questions, 20 possible points, all multiple choice, true or false, or fill in the blank. either totally easy or totally impossible. so the easy ones i would have known anyway, and the hard ones i wouldn't have known with hours of studying. so i win!! but really, this was the opposite of a good test of what we've learned this semester. the whole thing took ten minutes.

i'm going to go clean the mess i've turned the apartment into in my last few days of stressful, bachelor-style living. fall break starts tomorrow. yes!!!

halfway finished. can't...go...on...

my judaism paper is killing me.

tebbe is awesome. he ran the marathon in 4:05:00. it was exciting to watch, and crazy to see never-ending masses of people running by. 42,000 altogether is what i heard. a logistical nightmare. our group saw tebbe in china town in between mile 21 and 22, and again at mile 24.

crazy day. now i'm leaving to go help out with mu kappa international dinner tonight. ciao!

FRIDAY. that magical word.

had my second midterm today. it was...bad. reeeeally, reeeeeally bad. our prof basically wanted us to know every key person, event, and treaty since 1945 to today. i don't think anyone felt especially good about it. afterwards my prof asked me how it went. then he said, "i have to read them all this weekend. don't you feel bad for me?" i said, "no." haha.

sometimes people get all bent out over chapel. there are certainly times when some chapels are lacking, and some are too this and too that. and there are times when i'm pretty close to irate (even though i don't really get irate about much). people were pretty upset about today's chapel. i don't know. take everything with a grain of salt. don't care all the time. i don't mean that in an apathetic way at all. i don't know how to say it, i guess. pick your battles well, and don't pick the little things in chapel apart. they're human, we're human, communication is flawed. i don't know. just chill.

it's friday. what am i doing? time to recup from the week. =]