Busy, Busy, Busy!!

This is my busiest time of the year for sure!

As a high school English teacher, I am trying to keep up with all the grading. That is a full time job for sure! I am also the sponsor for our Student Council ,which is in charge of all the Homecoming activities. And Homecoming happens to be next week. MAJOR stress. Oh, and I am also a class sponsor, so I have to organize the all the stuff the class has to do for Homecoming. I am currently spending part of each day designing and painting a banner for the parade because if I didn't, it wouldn't get done. Luckily I have a few good kids I can rely on and delegate some things to, but there is just so much that I have to do myself.

As a photographer, fall is my busiest time of the year for senior and family sessions. Everyone wants fall pictures. I spend every Saturday taking pictures, then every evening editing them. It takes a lot of time to edit a senior session, get prints and products ordered, then package and deliver everything. I certainly earn the money I make from it. I often find that I am not charging enough to even make $10 an hour, but I find it hard to raise prices.

Lightroom is only my first round of editing

Creating a personalized app for a client

I love everything that is keeping me busy, but by winter, I will definitely be glad for a break!

Do you find that the things you love sometimes keep you so busy that you need a break from them?

Walking A Fine Line

I am a very devout and conservative religious person.  I think Calvin and Edwards had it right, and I wish I could be more like the Puritans were.  As a literature teacher, I often get to teach literature that has a religious connotation.  Friday I taught "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" by John Edwards.  This is pretty great stuff in my opinion, but I have to be careful that I don't go too far and lose my job.  I have to be constantly on guard that I say things like,"They believed." or "That is the Christian philosophy." instead of saying, "I believe." or saying that anything is truth when it comes to religious beliefs and theology. It is a fine line.

I love that I am able to share the gospel under the guise of teaching literature.  I mean, it is in the literature book, so no one can complain about teaching a sermon from a Puritan minister. I may not be able to say it is truth, but the message still gets put out there, and for a lot of these kids, it is the only time they hear it.

This year I had a girl say that she thought Edwards was crazy for thinking about people going to hell, and that she thought he had it totally wrong.  This really disturbed me for two reasons: 1. her family says they are Christians because they attend the (fairly liberal) Methodist church once or twice a year, and 2. she is the superintendent's daughter (so I have to be even more careful with what I say). I really thought about how to respond to that; I wanted her and the rest of the class to see that you can't say someone is crazy for trying to save someone from hell if that person TRULY believes the other person is going to hell...regardless if you think hell exists or not.

This video was my solution...