I was writing an early morning journal entry, but thought it might be good to share it with you guys too:
Yesterday I sat for several hours at work folding small strips of paper into fours. I had been asked to create a bunch of them for an open house today to get prospective English students interested in attending here. Each strip had some witty little writing tip such as "They're taking their chances who use 'there' without glance," that I had spent the previous day thinking up. I had then printed them out, copied them onto different colors and cut them all out myself. There had to be well over 100.
As I sat folding, I suddenly put my work into perspective. I had spent two days on a project that a bunch of kids were just going to look at for a second and throw away. Completely useless. As I kept thinking, my worries grew. I am the editor of the student newspaper at my university, and invest so much of my time and myself into it. Yet it's not a big or great paper compared to just about every other campus publication out there, and people who probably do less work than I do get paid for it on other campuses. The success of the paper is also tied to all the writers, and only a few of them really seem to care about it. Odds are that, as soon as I'm out of this university, the newspaper will vanish. There will be no one around who wants to take up all that work. But will my work mean anything then? Will anyone really care?
I realize I have been waiting for many things in my life to kick into gear. I can't think of B until there's A, yet I think of B all the time. And then there's C. What's C? I don't know, and it's killing me that I don't. It's a worldly way of thinking, worrying about things I have no control over, and I must give them up. It's sometimes easy to forget when you're sitting in a deserted office folding paper, but there are people for whom what I do matters. If I worry too much about the monumental things in my life I will lose sight of the smaller actions that have really defined me all this time.
"So I tell you, don't worry about the food or drink you need to live, or the clothes you need for your body. Life is more than food, and the body is more than clothes. Look at the birds in the air. They don't plant or harvest or store food in barns, but your heavenly father feeds them. And you know that you are worth much more than birds. You cannot add any time to your life by worrying about it."
--Matthew 6: 25-27
Yesterday I sat for several hours at work folding small strips of paper into fours. I had been asked to create a bunch of them for an open house today to get prospective English students interested in attending here. Each strip had some witty little writing tip such as "They're taking their chances who use 'there' without glance," that I had spent the previous day thinking up. I had then printed them out, copied them onto different colors and cut them all out myself. There had to be well over 100.
As I sat folding, I suddenly put my work into perspective. I had spent two days on a project that a bunch of kids were just going to look at for a second and throw away. Completely useless. As I kept thinking, my worries grew. I am the editor of the student newspaper at my university, and invest so much of my time and myself into it. Yet it's not a big or great paper compared to just about every other campus publication out there, and people who probably do less work than I do get paid for it on other campuses. The success of the paper is also tied to all the writers, and only a few of them really seem to care about it. Odds are that, as soon as I'm out of this university, the newspaper will vanish. There will be no one around who wants to take up all that work. But will my work mean anything then? Will anyone really care?
I realize I have been waiting for many things in my life to kick into gear. I can't think of B until there's A, yet I think of B all the time. And then there's C. What's C? I don't know, and it's killing me that I don't. It's a worldly way of thinking, worrying about things I have no control over, and I must give them up. It's sometimes easy to forget when you're sitting in a deserted office folding paper, but there are people for whom what I do matters. If I worry too much about the monumental things in my life I will lose sight of the smaller actions that have really defined me all this time.
"So I tell you, don't worry about the food or drink you need to live, or the clothes you need for your body. Life is more than food, and the body is more than clothes. Look at the birds in the air. They don't plant or harvest or store food in barns, but your heavenly father feeds them. And you know that you are worth much more than birds. You cannot add any time to your life by worrying about it."
--Matthew 6: 25-27
