Remember those nights as kids when we had a project due the next day and hadn't even started?
So we would go to our moms around 8 pm the night before, scared to death, asking for help, which they were more than happy to give. Then they would say something like, “Great! Let’s get started tomorrow right after school,” but instantly notice the sheer panic on our faces and ask in frustration, “When’s it due?” to which we would sheepishly respond, “tomorrow.” That's when the comedy ensued.
In my house, thankfully, my mother’s initial anger was often quickly offset by the outbursts of spontaneous laughter, which she tried to conceal on account of my feelings -- God bless her soul -- at my absolute butchering of middle school academic writing.
I’ll never forget the brilliant opening to my 7th grade history paper on Stonewall Jackson, “Everything was fine and dandy in 1864…”. My mother, struggling to contain her laughter, managed to tenderly advise, “You cant start a paper with ‘fine and dandy,’” not to mention it certainly wasn’t fine and dandy in the midst of the Civil War. I laughed, she laughed -- I was happy to have a good laugh at my expense as long as it meant getting help with the paper.
My mother was gifted in many ways; her mastery of the English language was just one of them. Plus she could type more than 110 words a minute making her perhaps, the best last minute paper resource on the planet.
Now my point in all this is to say, she could have easily written the whole thing for me in about a half hour, which is exactly what I was hoping for, but as we all know, it doesn’t work that way.
Instead, we stayed up as long as it took, bleary-eyed, trudging through that two-page paper. I was responsible for every word, every thought, every point, and how they cohesively tied together to answer the question my little paper sought to ask.
In those sleep-deprived, painful nights, she equipped me with the tools for tackling any paper that lay ahead. Those tools stuck with me through high school, undergrad, grad school, and even to this day.
We all face problems and adversity. And sometimes we get down on our knees and ask God to come in and just write the whole paper for us. But as we all know, it doesn't work that way.
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This is part of the series called “The Human Being Fully Alive” found here.
