Yesterday’s Epiphany

Back in my later days of highschool, I had a list of all the things I wanted to do during my lifetime. It wasn’t so much a list of goals or career choices contained within a 5 or 10 year period. I had those lists too, but one in particular was dedicated to specifically to the subject of excitement.

I had forgotten until yesterday when I attended the funeral of a woman who was not only known for being a tireless lover of God and servant of the church, but for being a lover of “play”.  When she first hired her administrator 15 years ago, she said, “I know you are a woman of God and that you pray, but do you love to play? Ministry is hard work, and if you don’t know how to play, you become burnt out… and boring.”

After Zack and I left the funeral, I couldn’t help but mull that statement over in my head, not because it was a new concept, but because I always had that philosophy until a couple of years ago when life got so busy with ministry that I had all but forgotten about what it’s like to take on a new type of excitement. I used to snowboard, jetskii, take random road trips in the middle of the night, snowmobile, tackle as many of the most enviggorating rollarcoasters I could find on the rare occasion when I could visit an amusement park. In a pinch, I would even band together with friends on a desperate search for some kind of a hill to sled on, even if all we had for sleds were pieces of cardboard or stollen lunch trays from the cafeteria.

Today, though anxious to play a little myself, I have been in bed since yesterday afternoon with a wave of exhaustion and a pounding headache. Instead of playing, I’m thoroughly enjoying the Planet Earth series, whilst occasionally dreaming up how I plan to decorate my house when we have enough money to do so.

If you’ve never seen Planet Earth, you have to! At this moment, I’m highly entertained by a sequence on baboons, only found in the Etheopian highlands and putting together yet another list- “places I have to see.”