This season was made for laughing out loud.

Every morning I awake to church bells across town wishing me good day. I lie in half-darkness behind drawn curtains and drowsily whisper hello in return. This morning there's a quality in them I'm not sure I recognize. I feel I am catching cheer--I don't remember cheer in these morning bells.
Sunlight pours in once again through my now thrown-back curtains. I sip my coffee under the tree outside my front door. It's true. There is a new cheer. The rain is gone.

Foreword the Second

To go on from my previous post, though, I should confess that I am terrible at this type of thing. Keeping track of my daily activities has never been easy for the ole' thinker up there top my neck. The process always seems to turn out much harder than I anticipate. A casual daily journal should be easy: "I woke up at such and such a time and ate such and such for breakfast. I went here, here, here, oh, and there, too, and did such and such a thing with these people. I ate lunch. I ate supper. I brushed my teeth. I went to bed." Shouldn't be too difficult. Thing is, for one reason or another it’s always no-go for me. When I get to reflecting back on a day, I first of all can't remember half the things I've done, and secondly, the half that does come to mind does so as a bundle of meaningless details. The stuff’s there, but why? And all this outside the third half--that is, everyday's jungle of random thoughts unattached in the consciousness to anything at all concrete.
I'm left trying to form tidy evening reflections based off hundreds of disconnected memory dots crazily splayed all over my hippocampus over the previous 24, 48, 20,000+ hours. I sit down to catch my mind’s nightly news, but always end up flicking through a thousand channels a second: "What a great weeken--Referat morgen über etwas in Geschi--Call the folks!" It takes me a good while to connect everything together, the minor details with the meanings behind them, and by the time I figure it out, it’s a new day, week, month, semester…
But every hour of real digging through the mind’s files is an hour well-spent. I consider real personal investment the main goal anytime I sit down to think or write in earnest. Without it am I doing anything more than organizing a mere afternoon travel log?
And not that a daily journal which leaves out personal meaning is altogether useless (depending on the audience); it's just not something I'm interested in keeping. When my five months abroad are over, I want to have a record of what I was thinking, how I was growing, the realness behind what I was experiencing—not simply what I ate for breakfast.
I should confess now, however, that I have to be a hypocrite for a while: I can't promise any meaningful personal commentary in these reflections any time soon. I have thankfully been recording little notes and the like every now and then throughout my whole time here so far, but it will be a good while before any of that sneaks its way onto this page. For one, that kind of reflecting, let alone writing, as I said takes me ages to do, and secondly, for concision's sake I really ought to stay away from it in most of these entries. It’s fun to ramble, but I don’t want to bore anyone.
But speaking of rambling, I need to bring this to a close. So, all in all, as I probably also spent too much of your time saying in the first of these needless Forewords, welcome to the as-yet-mostly-meaningless-but-in-due-time-infused-with-deeper-significance telling of the little details I’ve been up to since March, 2010. I hope you find it a pleasant read.
Yuppers.

Kurzes Vorwort

If you look up “study abroad” in the dictionary you’ll come across this definition: “The extended experience of either pleasant surprise or necessary life-lesson from knowing neither what one will be doing next nor how it will turn out.” I think that sums it up just about right, even if I did come up with it myself. Since February of this year I’ve been experiencing just that every moment of every day in and around Freiburg, Germany. Through ups, downs, gems and duds of all sorts, this always-adventure-filled life has been all in all fantastic for me, and I very much look forward to whatever may come in my remaining two and a half months.
Though I can rightly define my semester so far as knowing neither what I’ll be doing next nor how it will turn out, I should include in that definition the foundational faith that the Lord who has my highest good in mind has been directing all my foggy footsteps from the start. There's a proverb I've had memorized since the wee stages of my life that has truly come to define my personal philosophy since I arrived in Germany: "Trust in the Lord with all of your heart, and lean not on your own understanding. In all of your ways acknowledge the Lord, and he will make your paths straight" (Proverbs 3:5). Perhaps I am mistaken, and perhaps over the course of my life I’ll learn to significantly alter how I understand this verse, but I find in it a key freedom for everyday living that I've accepted more so this semester than ever before. If I leave my heart and mind in the right hands, which I pray to do everyday, I have the freedom to walk with unbridled joy heel to toe, toe to heel or however else my feet may fall, wheresoever my heart and mind may lead. I make choices and I trust them—because I know they are engineered by a higher power.
When I combine that faith with the peace from the promise of Galatians 5:16--that if I live according to the Lord’s desires I’ll be rescued from the deceitful desires of my own sinful nature--I find an incredible license: to grab the vim and vigor out of everyday and every circumstance, whether I'm in Germany or back at school, whether in the middle of nowhere on my bike or the middle of a rich conversation after class. No matter where I am or what I’m doing, if I’m following the right instructions I’ll reach the right destination.
Now that I think of it, there’s a better way to define the study abroad experience, and this written by an author far wiser than myself: “Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart” (Psalm 37:3). As far as I can tell, that’s no bad way to make the most of a semester abroad, even a life altogether.
If I can hold myself to it, this blog will be about the little things I come across living by that glorious definition.