It Can Wait......

Sometimes it's just easier to put stuff off and I take the easy way out. This is from June 9, 2012.
It's over. Just fifteen days ago, I got my end of the year checklist handed in and approved by Josh Bailey, our WCS Upper School Assistant Principal. It's the normal sheet teachers have to finish to end the year: a simple room inventory, all tests marked and grades turned in, any potential repairs over the summer, desks in straight rows, and boards wiped clean. This may be the earliest I have completed the chore in all of my years of teaching. We had a terrific faculty/staff luncheon that Friday and a wonderful graduation exercise that night but for me, by 2 PM on May 25, the hay was in the barn, to quote an old proverb. There was a bumper crop of hay for me this year.......

This isn't about a synopsis of the year or an evaluation of the events in Room 258 from August through May, though. This is about how I check out. Looking ahead is not my strength. This is what I do every May: I shove everything into drawers and storage cabinets and file cabinets where all of it is out of sight and out of mind. On August 1st, or twelve hours after I get off a jet from Saigon after a month in Vietnam, I will deal with the mess. On August 1st, I'll clean up the mess I left behind. You can't see the mess but it's there. All the pens and markers and staplers and wall hanging stuff and DVDs are in disarray BUT they are out of sight. I'll be ready when school starts- I always am. But it would be so much easier if I would have just taken care of it two weeks ago. Some things never change or change very reluctantly.This is one of those things. 

I'm not a procrastinator- there's just stuff I hate doing. Like shaving. Like the dishes. Like vacuuming the floor and making my bed. And putting stuff away neatly for the next school year. I'm disciplined in some ways- I workout religiously, I always do the laundry on Saturday, and I read the Bible every morning when I get up. In some things I'm kind of in the middle. In three and a half months, I'm giving a speech and preaching a wedding so I'm writing them mentally but not yet on my laptop. But I admit there are parts of my life I just stuff in the drawers and throw in the cabinet. I know I realize I'll have to deal with them later. The problem is, as life often teaches us, there's not always a later. Solomon taught about time. In Ecclesiastes 3, verse 11, he wrote this about God:
He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.
Sometimes, I irrationally act as if eternity is here on earth when we know that's not true. The oddest thing happened several hours ago when I was lifting weights at Chancellor's, my fitness club. I glanced up at the clock while I was in the middle of a set of lifts when I saw the clock had gone crazy! The minute hand started circling at a rate of once every ten seconds or so. Since I time where I am in my routines, I decided I needed to keep track on the clock on the far wall. And yet when I looked back up in several minutes, the clock in front of me was back in perfect time! Sometimes I wish my life speed would accelerate like that to get me through the stuff I detest and slow to a crawl when I love what I'm into. It doesn't work like that, does it? Oh well. I've got fifty-two days to worry about beginning school. At least, I believe I have fifty-two days- I can't argue with Solomon!

*Interesting side note: I started this entry fifteen days ago, right after I turned in my check list for the end of the year. It required changing some words at the beginning. I unknowingly convicted myself once more!*

Applicable quote of the day:
"Until you value yourself, you will not value your time.
Until you value your time, you will not do anything with it." 
 M. Scott Peck

God bless,
Steve
Luke 18:1
www.hawleybooks.com
E-mail me at steve@hawleybooks.com