Seminary Dropout

So I dropped out of seminary this weekend and for the last time. This was attempt #3 with five classes left. I was optimistic that I could make all of the layers of life melt beautifully together, but working in special education, scrolling through the kids’ two Chromebooks and iPad after school checking on assigned work, and reading for class until my brain felt like soup brought me to the inevitable. There were a few things I really missed or that needed extra attention:

Family read-aloud
The Hobbit has been on a constant play-pause; poor Bilbo will never get back to his warm hobbit home at the rate we were going.

Family game time
I don’t think I even remember how to play Monopoly Deal.

Missed online conferences/workshops I PAID for
I need to catch up on Hutchmoot content and a women’s workshop on the book Worthy by Fitzpatrick & Schumacher.

Writing
Deadlines haunted the end of my calendar, but molding the words onto the page has been pushed to the back burner. This was getting painful with my research paper about the creative mandate of Genesis 1:28. Yes, painful — I’m not being dramatic; reading about creativity when you are strapped for time to participate in the push and pull of carrying it out is really disheartening. Kind of like those people who played a sport but don’t have the same joy watching it as a spectator. (My husband loved playing baseball growing up but finds watching a game on TV extremely boring.)

I’m also an enneagram 8, so any restriction on what I really want to do is comparable to an assault from all that is evil in the world on my creative cocoon. There were times I fought God when He wanted to rock the frustration away this semester. I wanted to be able to do it all. I didn’t want to submit to rest. I gave up on my calming and enjoyable practice of mental sorting and planning (another post for another day) because there was just too much. I was a feral cat in survival mode. Not cute.

Kids in constant transition
There’s too much to write in this category. But, I will say that if you’re checking on your kid’s Google Classroom progress by just clicking on the Missing tab, you are not even seeing the whole picture. Our kids move from remote instruction to hybrid on Monday; I want to hear about their days instead of locking myself in my room for class.

Helping Clint out with household projects
Sometimes this includes hard work and other times it includes me just watching him do the hard work as I keep him company.

I also miss people — especially having no hesitation to linger and laugh long with them!

I know that some people will want to encourage me by saying I can always go back to finish my Master’s, but that would just be enabling my knife-in-my-teeth-I-will-conquer-it-all fleshly self through the jungles of life. I do better keeping a metaphorical Swiss army knife in my pocket for those times the heavy brush occasionally requires a little more hustle.

In one of my favorite books, Adorning the Dark, Andrew Peterson’s words border the start of this season in so many ways. In my ever-fermenting mind, the craft of writing is such a mental race with a tendency to lose my way (this is good and bad): “I wish I could order my thoughts and follow them to their ends. I wish I could track an idea to its logical or illogical conclusion the way C. S. Lewis did. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that I can’t learn without doing; I won’t know the story until I write it down. As long as the idea stays in the conceptual realm it withers.”

Over the past month or two, a lot had withered.

A lot of story, streams of delightful thoughts and quips, escaped before I could bandage the gash.

I don’t like that feeling; it makes me irritable.

Peterson also knows my “I don’t want to miss a thing” tendency and the danger that can follow: “I’m not afraid of hard work, but I do have an aversion to work that feels like a waste of time. That means I tend to throw myself into big projects, usually a few at a time, work until my mind is jelly, and if I don’t have a proper break then I’m going to have a proper breakdown.”

Thankfully, I didn’t get to that point where my husband needs to start my emergency shut-off override procedure, but this withdrawal from school is my “proper break,” my shifting focus, that I am very happy to dwell in.