Snow Day!

I don’t remember the last time I’ve experienced an official “snow day,” when school gets cancelled. I especially didn’t expect a snow day at Luther, considering all the snow we got in December without classes ever being cancelled. It was a pleasant surprise to learn this morning that I have the day off. It couldn’t have come at a better time.

Sometimes (ok, often) I forget to take a day of rest. Ironically, I have all but stopped celebrating the Sabbath since I started seminary! Last year, when I attended the Spanish-speaking congregation, I was usually at church from 9am until 2:30pm on Sundays. By the time I came home and ate lunch, it was time to start my reading for Monday classes. Not much actual "down time."

This year I’m at a different church, where the services are exactly 1 hour and 15 minutes. I have mostly been going to the Saturday evening service, so as to have all of Sunday free. But instead of actually resting on Sundays, I tend to work ahead on my homework for the week, do laundry, make food, etc. I’m not good at resting.

This weekend I realized how exhausted I am. Besides the normal life of being a student, for the past two Saturdays I taught my “Greek for church people” class. It was a wonderful experience that went very well, but it did take some energy out of me. Four hours is a long class, both for teacher and students. Plus, I put a lot of preparation in figuring out how to teach Greek in 8 hours through Spanish.

All that being said and done, by the time Sunday rolled around I was really tired, but decided to work ahead on my assignments for the week. When I went to bed last night, I dreaded the thought of getting up at 5:45am to shovel my car out of the snow and leave enough time to get to Luther for my 8am class.

Early this morning I checked the Luther website, just in case, and found out that classes had in fact been cancelled. And I finally understood the message that sometimes I just need to take a break.