Four weeks from yesterday is the last day of school. One month from today, we board a plane in the middle of the night to return to the U.S. for seven weeks. In between then and now are a lot of things that have to happen...visitors coming, two kids' birthdays, and a myriad of school projects and events, to say nothing of preparing to leave here for an extended period of time and just the daily challenges of life in Dar.
The problem is the same one that I face at the end of every school year: I'm out of energy. I'm tired of the daily routine of packing lunches, quizzing kids on spelling words, helping with homework and remembering an insane amount of details. We didn't lose any part of the tedious aspects of school by moving to Africa (library books, permission slips, P.E. clothes) and we added some more (swimming gear and the fact that packing a lunch is a herculean effort here). There is a great blog from last year that perfectly sums up my attitude at the end of the school year. You can read about the "worst end of school year mom ever" here.
The other challenge here is that we are moving into "winter." Even though we're pretty near to the equator, where the periods of light and dark are roughly equal the whole year, I can really tell a difference. It used to be dark after 7 p.m. and now it's moving closer to 6 p.m. The bigger impact for me is that it's not getting light in the mornings until much later - well after 6:30 a.m. (and the kids leave for school before 7 a.m.) This is a big difference from ending the school year in the States, where the days get longer. I miss that extra burst of energy that sunlight brings in the early mornings.
Our family just completed a 5K race this past weekend and so I've been thinking a lot about the "race" metaphor in the Bible - the challenge to finish strong, to win the prize. My view of these verses in the past has been that in order to get our crown, we sprint across the finish line, arms raised in victory. But most races aren't like that. When you've run as hard as you can earlier in the race, sometimes "finishing strong" means you are limping across that finish line in exhaustion.
I believe we are not called to run fast, but simply to run faithfully. We are commanded to "run with perseverance the race marked out for us." (Hebrews 12:1). We are instructed to fight the good fight, finish the race and keep the faith (2 Tim 4:7). Sometimes, as written in Isaiah 40, we will "soar on wings like eagles" or "run and not grow weary" but other times we will "walk and not be faint."
Words I'm holding on to as I'm walking (trying to keep from fainting) and limping into these last 18 days of school....
Someone recently said to me that no matter where we are in comparison to where we think we should be, if we're next to God, we're in the right place.
ReplyDeleteSimilar to your idea of running faithfully, but it was really helpful. We are each on our own path, and a long as that path is the one that God set out for us, we're on the right one.