Back in Step

For educators--which both Husband and I are--coming out of Christmas vacation always feels like trying to regain your balance. The richness, the heaviness and the nonstop action of the Christmas season is over now. Both of us had our faculties over to our home for meals, so our house got decorated up to the nines. Despite the fact that we have tried to tone Christmas down to a quieter and less commercial level, the mad dash always catches us sooner or later. If it's not a rush to buy, buy, buy, it's the rush to give time to people we work with and family and friends we care about, to let them know they are loved and appreciated and enjoyed.

But now it's done. Christmas is has been put away and our home looks bare, even spartan. The time spent and travels completed put our work on hold for a couple of weeks--a massive hiccup in the weekly rhythm of the school year. Suddenly we have to re-enter that rhythm, pick up the threads, figure out where we were and make progress again. The school year is still underway and must be completed, like birthing a child. There are big projects and deadlines looming, meetings to attend and lead, and documents to be written. The spirit shrinks back from it, and yet here it all is, bearing down on us like a merciless steamroller. It will happen. It's the stuff of our lives and of our employees' and students' lives, and somehow we manage to get back into it year after year, with varying degrees of the blues providing the emotional soundtrack of spirit.

I really haven't anything philosophical to say about all this. My new year's resolutions have been on the order of "continue." Continue to do what is in front of me. Continue to live with gratitude. Continue to meet the divine appointments that God seems to bring my way nearly every day, those moments of significance and insight that happen between me and others.

Continue.

"Let the love of the brethren continue. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by this some have entertained angels without knowing it." Heb. 13: 1, 2.

Continue.