Balance

I had a great weekend. There were many things that made it great, one of them being playing fish bowl two nights in a row. If you would like to learn how to play this game, please ask me. You won't be sorry.

Anyway, fish bowl isn't what this post is about. It is about balance. Balancing the emotional, spiritual, physical, social and mental aspects of seminary has not been an easy task. This semester I have found myself going from one extreme to the other, only to find myself exhausted because I can't find balance. At first I was all about the social and academic parts of seminary. Anytime I got invited anywhere, I was there. I also was doing a great job of keeping up with all my schoolwork and even finishing things early (gosh that seems like a long time ago). While this was fine for a while, I found myself spiritually thirsty. So, I made a much bigger effort to spend more time with my maker. This helped...ALOT.

In the meantime, I was still busting my little booty to do all my schoolwork and do it well. I slowly but surely began to fall behind in the millions of pages of reading we are required to do. I remember one day in particular when I had a mini meltdown about all my schoolwork. The stress had gotten to me and I kind of wanted to just give up. I had no idea how I was supposed to get it all done. I changed my strategy to just working on one thing at a time. Instead of looking at what was due 3 weeks from now, I was just looking at the upcoming week. That helped alot.

With 3 weeks left to go and 3 major projects/papers and a final left to go, I find myself strangely calm. I have realized that it is just not worth the stress. I somehow seem to always get everything done, so why worry about it? I may not give 100% effort on every assignment, and I am ok with that. I want to be sane when I graduate. I focus on the assingments that I believe will be most beneficial to my future couseling career. I have come one step closer in learning this whole balancing act.

Back to the beginning of this post...the whole reason my weekend was great is because it was balanced. I did some schoolwork, did alot of hanging out with great friends and spent some great alone time with God. Past weekends have been filled with allllll schoolwork. That is lame. I am not lame anymore....hopefully. I know I will continue to teeter and totter on this balance beam that is seminary, but hopefully I will fall off less and less.

Of course I can't take credit for learning all of this. God has shown me all of this and I trust that he will continue to help me find balance in my life. He has been a great teacher so far and I have no reason to doubt him!