A Week Off

We had been eyewitnesses of his majesty. 2 Peter 1:16


These times between semesters can be a double-edged sword. Certainly it is wonderful to have a week free of any scheduled events save a few hours of working with second-graders on Tuesday and a few hours of guitar lessons on Wednesday. In my free time this week I finished a novel, The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, and cleaned the apartment (mostly) and learned to play some bass runs on my weeks-old guitar and watched half a dozen episodes of Planet Earth on DVD and spent probably too many hours at the local coffee shop, Third World Café, where today they gave me a frequent customer punch card. So yeah, it’s been a nice week.

Oh right, except I also called it a double-edged sword. On a week like this I can’t help feeling like I’ve been awfully unproductive. I keep thinking of all the things I did not do this week – and there were plenty of those, to be sure. I should have emailed some acquaintances I’ve lost touch with – and some new ones I’m supposed to start keeping in touch with. I should have cleaned out the all-purpose storage room in our apartment, which is becoming dangerously full of 2 or 3 important papers mixed randomly in with 3 or 4 hundred unimportant ones. I should have done some work for that Ministry-in-Context project that’s likely to get lost in the shuffle of the busy spring semester. But alas, now the week is over, and all of these things, along with the myriad other guilt-inducing not-done tasks that seem to keep sprouting up in my head, are going to have to wait for another time.

I could, of course, get started on one of these tasks. Instead, I’m sitting at the coffee shop (again), gazing out at the snow that has been blanketing our fine city for the last 24 hours or so. Since I’m trying to write a neatly conclusive third paragraph, I’m hoping the snow is trying to tell me something. If it is, it’s probably something like Quit worrying and enjoy the snow, you gloomy existentialist! (Snow has an advanced vocabulary.) And I should, really, enjoy the snow, because even though it’s been falling almost nonstop for the longest time all winter, it’s not likely to last. It’ll melt just like this weeklong vacation. And so, as always, even when I'm not paying attention I have indeed been an eyewitness of the majesty – a majesty that is unscheduled, gone-before-you-know-it, always falling always melting, and sometimes even, yes, gloriously unproductive.

MCK