oren por mi

Hermanos, oren por mi.

This is a line I often hear from my pastor during the announcement time at church: Brethren, pray for me.  Normally, the pastor’s appeal for prayer refers to his great difficulty remembering names of people in the congregation, but his plea is nonetheless sincere.  I find myself in the same spot today, standing behind the pulpit (sitting in front of my computer), appealing to the congregation (writing a blog) to pray for me.  Like the pastor, I do not come before you with an earth-shattering request.  He asks for prayer to remember names; I ask for prayer to remember God’s peace and to find my sanity. 

As I wrote last week, our school schedule requires that I teach little kids.  This is something I am not used to, but (as Pastor Bob rightly advised) just because this is not my gift does not give me an excuse not to try.  So I am trying my best.  I didn’t think it was possible for me to work any harder than I have for the past two years, but I was wrong.  I’m finding that I have to be way more organized than I’m used to, and I have to have lots of activities planned and laid out before the week begins.  This results in slightly more stress and more preparation time.  So for these reasons, my mind has been a little anxious lately.

Our weekdays are pretty full with school, driving kids home, and after-school care.  We now often have some children stay until 4:30 or 5:30.  Then there’s just enough time to squeeze in a workout before dinner and a meeting or church or something in the evening.

Then, of course, life happens.  Saturday comes, and I get all set to spend hours in my classroom, and instead I find myself cleaning up after people and taking care of other last-minute occurrences.  I know this is a part of life here that we all must deal with, but my mind and body do not have enough spare energy to do this right now.  Then, it’s Sunday, and what I thought would be my day of rest turns into another day of work.  Like I said before, this is nothing earth-shattering, but—brethren pray for me.  The last thing I want is to run myself ragged and spend months sick like I did last year.

So, enough of my complaining.  (I just wanted to paint a picture for people who forget that I don’t have free time to spend lying on the beach.) 

I’ll end on a happy note.  Last week, Laurie, the Schneider family, and I did a 5K at one of the resorts nearby, and I got my personal best time—5 minutes less than my previous best!  Woo hoo!