Day Six

And now for something completely different. No, not Python. Primary.

I am a big believer in balance. I find it to be an absolute necessity if one wants to have any degree of sanity in life. Too much of one thing or the other, and an entire life can be thrown off kilter. Sure, there are seasons in which one facet of life takes over by sheer necessity - when you're up against a deadline, when your child is sick, or when your daughters' dance studio suffers a major fire and the staff is in desperate need of help. In such moments, you focus and deal. And then you move on to make up for whatever tasks or schedules have fallen by the wayside. You get back to the delicate art of balance. About two and a half years ago, a different kind of balance asserted itself upon my life. In the midst of everything we were trying to keep up with as a family, I was asked to "take charge" of the 70+ children in our church between the ages of 18 months and 11 years. (Please note that these are monster quotations marks! I certainly do not do it alone!)

We have a very diverse congregation and these cute kids come from every conceivable background - from the strongest of families to anything but and everything in between. They need a lot of love, understanding, and, yes, lots and lots of patience. At the moment this request was made of me, I felt overwhelmed and utterly unequal to the task. I hated babysitting while I was growing up and had not ventured near the children's meeting room from the moment I was old enough to leave. This was not my thing by any stretch of the imagination. Nevertheless, I said yes and dove in with both feet. And I nearly drowned several times, but that is a completely different story!

It took me a while to understand the gift of such responsibility. One day, it hit my like the proverbial ton of bricks. I mean seriously, what better foil for hard academic research can there be than two solid hours in the middle of wacky, energetic, wonderful kids once a week? During the week I am a scholar and a mom. On Sundays I am a walking kleenex, a security blanket, a vaudeville act, and a buddy. I am racing through the halls making sure each class has a teacher, finding sufficient numbers of chairs (a huge challenge in and of itself - we are the third congregation to meet in our building each week), and playing goalie at the door when escape attempts are made. I cannot think of any experience further removed from the rigors of academia than this one. And the deep satisfaction I feel at the end of an exhausting Sunday can rival anything I've felt following just about any other effort exerted in my life - except with my own beautiful girls, of course, but that too is a different story altogether.) In fact, Sundays often give me a kind of emotional and spiritual jolt that helps me balance all the challenges and responsibilities of the week that follows. Not a bad exchange, if I do say so myself.

Sure, there are days when I am ready to abandon it all out of sheer frustration. These are kids after all! There are times when my responsibilities require me to act as jail warden when children misbehave. There are times when all I want to do is hand in my keys and run. But these kids - as crazy as they can be sometimes - are incredibly dear to me. They are my responsibility. They are my friends. They remind me every week that there is so much more to life - and to love about life - than the "hard stuff" like school. And I love them more than I ever thought possible that morning two and a half years ago when their spiritual care was placed into my unsteady hands.

Thank goodness for balance.