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 the mount! I'm fixed upon it,
      mount of Thy redeeming love.

Here I raise my Ebenezer;
      here by Thy great help I've come;
And I hope, by Thy good pleasure,
      safely to arrive at home.
Jesus sought me when a stranger,
      wandering from the fold of God;
He, to rescue me from danger,
      interposed His precious blood.

Oh 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, Oh take and seal it,
      seal it for Thy courts above.

John Wyeth

This time of year has so many emotions for me, both good and difficult.

This week I had to leave work to get Rachel from school with flu-like symptoms. Both Courtney and Jessica's final illnesses started that way, so that sort of thing has an emotional resonance. The call about my five-year-old brought all those memories to the top. By the time I got to her school, she had recovered and they had sent her back to class. She bounces back so quickly that it is surprising (I was only fifteen minutes away, especially at that time of day when traffic is light).

Of course she had been in the nurse's office longer, they hadn't been able to reach her mother or her sister. In their minds, of course a dad is called last, which when I'm in court or teaching a class is probably the way my wife thinks it ought to be. I no longer have the emotional load I once had, but the ghosts of memory are still bitter sweet.

A friend's son had a kid who had lived in the Wichita Falls area in one of his college classes. He told his mom that he told her that he knew someone who had lived in Wichita Falls and she told him she had been one of Jessica's friends at Church. In the middle of his mom telling the story, it seemed to suddenly hit home to her that Jessica was real.

Perspective is a funny thing, the way it comes upon us.