responsibility

This is kind of bad time-management, but it's been hard for me not to post on here these past few weeks... also, I feel like all of my writing has been to a "personal statement" tilt lately. Even the letters I write people--or the pseudo letters that I start in my notebooks to trick myself into thinking I'm not working on my personal statement.

There are far too many things I could write about. And this post is going to be a bunch of disordered thoughts, I'm afraid.

With the last draft that I "finished" and sent to a couple readers, I mentioned nothing about Thailand.

Today we talked about struggles at church--problems, difficulties that believers face, or that God brings about in order that we would go to him.

"Struggles" has been a key word in some of my personal statements, although I don't know that I've really faced all that many struggles. Depends on how you look at things, I guess. Maybe moments where I've been uneasy, or where I couldn't easily get out of situations that weren't fun is a better way to refer to my "struggles."

Last semester, as you know, I often postponed certain responsibilities--like grading--because they weren't fun and I didn't want to do them. Perhaps I felt entitled enough not to need to do those things; I don't know. But if you were reading at that time, you'll know that I also felt rather unsettled about things.

In the book Contemplative Prayer, by Thomas Merton, that I've been reading, I've been learning--or relearning--that in times when we think we are doing something spiritual, but are really neglecting other things in our lives that God desires us to do (God's will for us, versus our own will for us--self-assessed as "God's will"), we will find our attempts at knowing God's peace ultimately frustrated. And so, last semester when I would ride the bus to Bang Na in the mornings and try to combat my mental anxiety about facing my classes when I hadn't graded their papers or really devoted my heart to the class-preparations, I would sing songs silently to God and try to "feel His peace."

Well, I think we all know I'd been disobedient. Didn't God give me these responsibilities as a teacher? Why, then, did I feel I was allowed to ever cast off my responsibilities until the tomorrow that never became today?

I guess this stuff is coming up because, when I think about some of the things I wrote during those months of unrest, many of them dissatisfy me--possibly because my heart was never in the right place while writing them. And are these the kinds of things I can condense into one or two sentence for a personal statement? Is this something that should even be mentioned? The fact that, though I face difficulties, my sense of unease rarely leaves and my writing often suffers when I use it to avoid my responsibilities. This follows with the line I seem so attached to this year--"Out of the heart, the mouth speaks."

Where is Grace in these times? I suppose that knowing God provides us with our tasks and then deliberately choosing to put those tasks on hold--when it's perfectly viable for us to accomplish them--is not considered repenting and therefore leaves no room for grace. There is grace when we, seeing our wrongs, become willing to turn around, to die to ourselves, and to follow Him and His plan for our lives, rather than our own plans.

Speaking of which, I'm feeling uneasy, and He's given me papers to grade with time still in the day (there's probably even enough to continue working on personal statements--in a state of peace).

I can use your prayers, if you think of me. :)