A Sunday of Donuts and Other Treats

In some ways, yesterday was a good Sunday.  We had a new member officially join us yesterday--she's the grown up daughter of a member, and she's been attending regularly since Christmas Eve.  It's our 3rd New Member Sunday in a year--hurrah!  

For the first New Member Sunday, the church council president got the donuts from an upscale donut place in Bristol.  For the second one, we stopped at Dunkin Donuts between Johnson City and Bristol.  Yesterday I went to Donut Stop in Arden, NC, a few minutes from my house.  They were actually open at 5 a.m., just as they said they were in various sites.  They had a huge variety of donuts--and they were delicious.

I didn't feel wiped out when we got home, as I sometimes do.  We took care of some paperwork tasks left over from the week before.  We watched the sermons of other churches, as we often do.  We cooked the salmon that we never got around to cooking on Saturday.  We watched some of the home remodel shows, one of our go-to genres that we both like to watch, as long as we don't get derailed into talking about our own home improvement plans.

We watched the Property Brothers restore 2 multi-million dollar mansions, which was a bit surreal.  The next show was set in Las Vegas, 2 flippers taking deeply run down properties and renovating them with constantly changing budgets that made no sense.  I realized how deeply tired I was.

It was only 6:45.  I told myself I was going to read in bed for a bit.  Maybe I could make it to 8:00, a bedtime that is barely respectable for adults:  toddlers get later bedtimes.  But I was asleep by 7:10.  I drifted off thinking about how the light outside was so similar to October early evening light.

Do I feel rested today?  Sort of.  But I am still facing a week full of tasks that can be exhausting.

Still, today and tomorrow are the last two days of my in-person classes meeting, which will free up a lot of time.  I will do what I always do:  make lists, get through the tasks on them, cross them off--and look forward to the time when I have less on the to-do list.

Jesus Remodels a Fixer Upper

I have been up early, both fretful and hopeful, thinking about taxes, thinking about home renovation shows and real life fixer-uppers, working on some poetry submissions.  Usually I'd be revising a sermon on Sunday morning, but I got that done last night, after an up and down day.

I was thinking of mid-life crises, how some of us buy convertibles and others buy run down houses to fix up.  I had planned to work on a poem about Jesus having a mid-life crisis and buying a run down house to renovate--the idea came to me on Friday.  But I worried that readers would reasonably point out that Jesus didn't exactly live until mid-life to be able to have a midlife crisis. 

My Jesus in the World poems can demand a willing suspension of disbelief, since Jesus is doing activities that he didn't do in the Gospels:  bowling, going to a holiday cookie swap, helping with hurricane clean up, and so on.  But I worried that mention of a midlife crisis would disrupt that suspension of disbelief.

This morning, the solution came to me, and it's so obvious I hesitate to admit that it didn't come to me sooner.  I can take out the reference to a mid-life crisis.  Let the reader decide why Jesus is buying a run-down house to renovate. 

There are so many wonderful ways this poem could go--it's so wonderful to have a glimmer of an idea that's closer to fully recognized than just a whisp and to have poem creation to look forward to in the week to come.

Friday: Bad Traffic, Good Fish Fry

Yesterday was the kind of commuting hell day that makes me happy that summer is coming, and I'll soon have a break from 6+ days of commuting.  

Driving down, I thought that I was lucky because I was headed east on I 26.  On the other side of the highway, an 18 wheeler lay on its side across the 2 westbound lanes, with cars off the road on either side.  The interstate was closed down, with traffic rerouted.

I wouldn't be headed back west for 5 hours, so I figured that it would be cleaned up by then.  It was, but there was another accident by then.  Happily, it wasn't as bad as the morning accident.  Further up the road, another accident slowdown, even though it was cleared up and on the other side of the interstate.

I left campus a smidge early so that we had some extra time to get to Bristol for the fish fry at Faith Lutheran.  By the time I got home, we just barely had enough time to get there--until we got to the next round of accidents.  We were 20 minutes late--I got there in time to thank the first round of diners for coming.  

We still had plenty of time to help out with the fish fry:  we got there at 5:20, and the event was over at 7:00.  Everyone was in good spirits, both the church volunteers and the community folks who came for a good meal and fellowship.  It was a great night.

It's an interesting event:  all the funds raised are for neighborhood charities, particularly the ones that feed people.  It's less about evangelism:  most of the people who come already have a church home.  It's a small community, so many of the people know each other, both the church members and the diners.  There are moments when I feel like I've fallen into a Norman Rockwell painting, and I mean that in the best possible way.  

Grading in the Wee, Small Hours of the Morning

I have been up for hours, literally hours, grading.  Two of my four online classes are finished, so I decided to get the grading done, since I couldn't fall back asleep after I woke up at 1:30.  So, I graded the final research essays, did some checking to make sure that I hadn't overlooked anything in the gradebook, and submitted final grades.  Submitting final grades isn't automatic.  I have to toggle between 2 tabs and enter in each grade.  But I now have submitted final grades for 2 of 4 online classes.

Am I caught up with grading?  Goodness gracious no.  It's the time of year when I won't really be done for another week and a half.  Papers are coming in, day and night.  But it does feel good to make progress.

Let me also remember that I continue to try to capture poem ideas.  Some have been in my head for months:  every time I see a tattoo, I think of a colleague who had a tattoo of a tomato plant on his arm, and I've been trying to capture that tattoo and give it a deeper meaning.  One idea came to me in a rush when I saw someone's online outrage post about a recent vote about allowing drilling/mining above the Northern Boundary Waters, which reminded me of a friend who died recently, and I tried to write a poem about both northern and southern waters and boundaries.  Neither poem is finished yet--in fact, I have yet to have crafted enough of them to know that I have a poem or just an idea.

Next year when my year-to-year contract converts to a tenure track faculty position, I'll teach one less class each term, and I'm looking forward to seeing if I get more writing done--by which I mean not just writing but actually getting to rough drafts and revised drafts. 

A Return--Briefly--to my Regularly Scheduled Thursday

My schedule today feels a bit crammed, but I remind myself that I've gotten spoiled.  For the past month, I haven't had my Lutheran Confessions class that meets by way of Zoom session on Thursday morning.  Today, I'll make the trek to the office even earlier than usual so that I can get my laptop set up for the class which starts at 8:45.  Then I'll have the last conferences of the semester with my creative writing students and then a writing day for my English 102 students.

I have my food packed--breakfast and lunch on campus.  I have my outfit picked out.  I am trying not to think about how tired I am and all I need to do in the coming weeks before we get to summer.

The last time we had an actual class meeting was March 19, which was the day after I had my meeting with the provost and my dean, where I was offered, and accepted, the tenure track promotion offer.    Part of my brain was thinking about all the implications of the meeting (happy implications) while I tried to focus on Reformation history and the class at hand.

In some ways, that's the story of the past year or two, or maybe my whole life.  I have multiple tracks in my head, multiple responsibilities tugging at me.  This week, I'm thinking about all the grading that I need to do, along with the paper for Lutheran Confessions that is due in a week, and oh, yes, a sermon for Sunday, let me not forget that.

When I step back, I reflect on the fact that I won't have to do this again--next week, my in-person classes are over.  Let me do what I always do:  take a deep breath, keep breathing, and keep prioritizing my to-do list.

A Different Kind of Getting to Know You Exercise

Let me remember to record a really neat getting to know you exercise that we did the first night at the Create in Me retreat.  It's something that could be modified for non-retreat groups, and I'll give some ideas at the end of the post.

Advent

Our retreat theme was "Nature, Imagination, and Liturgy," so our opening exercise revolved around the liturgical seasons:  Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Holy Week, Easter, Pentecost, and Ordinary Time.  

Epiphany

When we checked in, we had a nametag with a piece of colored paper in it--we sat at the table that had a larger sheet of colored paper that matched the color in the name tag.  It was a great way to make sure that we mingled new folks with returning folks.

Lent

The color of the paper matched the liturgical season (purple for Lent, for example).  We had a sheet of facts about the season, along with a small, blank banner.

Christmas

There was a table of all sorts of supplies.  Our project was to make a banner that matched the season, along with a song or prayer or poem.  We only had 20 minutes.

Ordinary Time

I admit that I was skeptical at first, as we sat there, every table staring blankly at the blank banner.  But it was a room of creative people, so soon we sprung into motion.  The energy level and discussion level rose.

Pentecost

When we were finished, we went around the room, explaining the banners and presenting our song or prayer or poem.  I was impressed with what we created--and impressed with how this exercise helped us get to know each other through a joint task and some friendly competition.

Easter

Could I create a non-religious variation for the first week in class?  I've used getting to know you Bingo, which is good.  The banner creating meant that people didn't have to move around the room and approach strangers, which is a plus for a lot of people.

Holy Week

I have a vision of this exercise, but with secular holidays and seasons, along with the holiday of Christmas, which is universal for my students.  Could non-creative students rise to the challenge?  I think they could.  Let me tuck this idea away.

A Tale of Three Butterflies

For most Create in Me retreats, we have a community art project, something we can work on together.  Some times, the work stays at Lutheridge, like the cross as tall as a human, made of clear plastic, filled with broken things.  One year, we knotted a quilt for Lutheran World Relief.  This year, we made a huge butterfly, decorated with bits of nature.  I brought it back to my house because Lutheridge didn't really have a place for it, and it had so much glue on it that I wasn't sure it was a good idea to leave it beside a trail to decompose, as we had once thought we would do:

Here's what it looked like at worship yesterday:

It began as a series of fan blades.  Here's what it looked like when my spouse and I first constructed it last week:

I felt a keen sense of failure and despair at this early stage.  My friend on the planning team had sent me this picture when describing what the group had in mind and asking if my spouse could build the base for it:

I wrote to my friend to tell her that we might not have created what she had in mind.  She wrote back the most perfect reply:  "It will look just as it should--a unique community effort."  I so needed those words, to know that I hadn't let the team down.

In the end, I like what we created better.  One friend used the leftover dried flowers that she created for her drop in station.  We used some of the leftover wood circles that had been cut for a prayer project.  We used interesting bits that people found during outdoor time.  

And in the end, yes, it looked just the way it needed to look--many good life lessons/reminders here.