Baby Steps (Disclaimer: This post has nothing to do with babies!)

When we moved, I dumped all 27 boxes of my school/teaching stuff in a corner and ignored it because it rested neatly against the wall; I would deal with it when I felt like it, which could be the next time we move. This school stuff joined the list of "things I'll get to eventually." But lately, on a husband-enforced hiatus from scrapbooking for a few weeks, I have eyed the mountain of boxes, ready to do battle.

I started easy, by going through and pulling out all books, to be sorted and shelved later. Some boxes have books and files mixed together, like one box labeled “11th Grade Honors.” Fully half this box was filled with research papers collected at the end of the year a few years ago. I kept them to use some as examples the next time research papers were assigned, but I haven’t taught that class since. Yesterday I read a few, then stopped to take a break and mull over the next step. Ideally, I should read the research papers again, pick out a few good and bad ones, then throw out [rather, recycle – or burn, to prevent plagiarism?] the rest.

But I don’t want to read them all again. As I read and recalled memories of what each student was like, I also began to have suspicions. The first time I read these papers, I was a first-year teacher. Now, reading them with more experienced eyes, I see many phrasings that could not have been written by that student. At the time, the only criminal I “caught” was the one dumb enough to rip out the pages from a public library reference book to use in his required appendix, stapling said pages to computer paper.

I am physically unable to just throw out all these papers without culling a few to use as future examples, but how to go about it? What about the other projects I will uncover, reviving the same dilemma? And isn’t it time for an ice cream break?

Stepping away from the problem to gain some perspective (a.k.a., “avoiding the problem”), I sat down to read World magazine, to which we subscribe. I enjoy reading Andree Seu’s columns, as she reflects on everyday life. Her column in this week's issue could have been written by ME, it describes me so accurately, not to mention eerily corresponds to my current predicament. Some excerpts (full text is here):

If you have the same problem I have—walking around in a cloud of vaguely nagging uncompleted tasks—management consultant David Allen has suggestions for Getting Things Done. Look at the book as an elaboration of "doing the next thing," which, in its Christian application, involves acknowledging the following division of labor: Trust the loving and omniscient God to protect your life; you, attend to the next required action.

The fact is that 80 percent of everything in every drawer in your house never gets used. And you know in your heart that every new paper you throw on the pile on your desk renders the paper directly beneath it exponentially less likely to be dealt with. So you have started another pile in another area of the house for "urgent-urgent things," to distinguish them from "urgent things" languishing in the first pile.

All these are invisible monkeys on your back, not unlike Pilgrim's burden in the John Bunyan tale, except it's not sin but mental clutter that robs your peace. God would have you free of this ("We have the mind of Christ"—1 Corinthians 2:16). It's not a moral issue, of course, except in the sense that everything under the sun is a moral issue, in a cosmos owned by God. Keeping your rafters from sagging is a moral issue (Ecclesiastes 10:18). …

Is it bugging you that you haven't read your Bible in about six months? Okay, either live with the gnawing discomfort or take the next action. Maybe the next action is, "Where's my Bible? Honey, do we own a Bible?" Or maybe what's shipwrecked your good intentions is something as small as the looming imagined hassle of not knowing where to start in your reading—Old Testament or New Testament? Make an intuitive stab at that decision, then break the Bible open to the place on your night table, so that tomorrow morning you won't be waylaid by that other psychological barrier of having actually to thumb through for the right page. …

I guess I’ll put the box of 11th grade papers aside for now and do the next task, which is put files into piles according to grade/class, since everything was haphazardly shoved together into boxes when I packed at school. And maybe Jesus will return before I have to return to the pile of research papers and make a decision.