Well!

Last weekend I went to Springfield, MO for a conference for the Assemblies of God. They had a bunch of student leaders from their 20 (?) colleges, and 14 Chi Alpha students from 11 different campuses.

It was pretty amazing. They treated us like royalty. Everything was high quality and completely paid for...the only money i spent while I was there was getting food in the airport.

and it was great to meet a bunch of people, and we had breakout sessions where all the XA students just got to sit and talk about our ministries, what is going on, what sorts of things we do, what God has been doing recently...that was the best part. Really encouraging. :)

Missouri and New York, I am convinced, are not in the same country. It was shocking to me how open and happy and friendly people were, how they would stop on a busy road to let people walk across a crosswalk, how they talked about God and Jesus anf forgiveness and made jokes about democrats during a show that was sort of like an off-broadway musical performance, in Branson, which is apparently the "entertainment capitol of the midwest".

but it was a good time, and I'm really glad I went.

Yesterday the girl I was working with showed me this game called "filler" which is quite addicting...and i played if for the 3 hour shift instead of studtying for the MCAT...after having spent the entire first half of the day reading a book. which i finished that evening.

The coolest thing of the day was we went to a research lab where the professor took us on a tour, where he's doing research on heart valves and heart valve replacement and trying to build artificial heart valves out of tissue-based materials...awesome stuff! We also saw chicken embryos that have been removed from the eggs and are growing in incubators in some liquid, and you can see their tiny, tiny little hearts beating. SO amazing!

It was exceedingly interesting, and stuff like that almost makes me want to go into research...but then I think that the very basic level at which he explained his work to us was all I really wanted to know, and I would not enjoy getting into the immense detail that he probably knows about the cells that make up and develop into the cells of a heart valve, the development process, etc.

anyways...school is really annoying me, I don't want to be bothered with work right now. I just want to go home and spend time with people without having to worry about due dates and deadlines. I can't wait for some time in life where there is lots of stuff to do today, but nothing that needs to be planned ahead for and worried about and plotted out for the future. is that day ever going to come? I don't know...