“Overwhelmed”
We all feel overwhelmed at times. Even good things, things we enjoy and feel passionate about, can inundate us with fear and frustration. No one is exempt from being overwhelmed. For example, here is my journal entry for this morning:
Friday, July 26, 2019
So, why have I not been posting more blogs, you ask? Partly, because I have been getting more chances to teach. And while I love teaching biblical subjects, I am more than a little overwhelmed right now. (Can you be a little overwhelmed?)
Here is what I am facing right now. I had done a lot of work on a couple of courses for the fall semester, which is coming up in a hurry. A few days ago, I was asked to switch out those two courses for two others. I thought to myself, well, I need to be flexible. I’m an adjunct. Okay, I’ll do it. Then, I discovered that one class has sixty-one students in it, and the other has twenty-one. I’ve never taught a class bigger than about thirty. So, I need to choose textbooks and get the syllabi together for these two classes, and I have very little time in which to do it.
Additionally, I am currently teaching one undergraduate class, and preparing to teach two masters level classes in a little over a week. These two masters level courses are hybrid classes, which means that I will be meeting with students in person for a very intensive week in early August. One class goes from 8:00 to noon, and the other from 1:00 to 5:00, five days of that week.
So, I have too much to do and too little time to get it done. I need to work on both sides of the equation—the too much to do, and the too little time. I can do two fundamental things.
First, I need to keep doing things that energize me and keep me on the right path. Therefore, I need to continue to exercise and to work at recovery from this addiction. If I “free up more time” by means of refusing to work on bodily health and recovery wisdom, I am walking in neither wisdom nor freedom.
Second, I need to cut back radically on what I “need” to do. Do I really need to do this? That is a question I need to ask myself many times in the course of the day. And I need to follow up with another question: What do I really need to be doing right now?
Right now, a bird is singing outside my window right now, anticipating the dawn. It is a call to worship for Matins, the Morning Song Service for the worship of God. This song is also part of the healthy rhythms of my life. And so is this blog post.
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