Calvin and Hobbits

I truely have a love hate relationship with education. On the one hand, there is nothing better than learning. To be in an environment where there is such an emphasis on improving your intellect, stretching the mind, and delving into research and books etc. --- exploring the different facits of our world and our worldview. It's so exciting and it's an amazing place to be as a young adult trying to find your way in the world and where you fit in the equation. But while this is truely an exhilerating and stretching experience, it can take such a toll on your life. Let's take my current semester as an example. There are so many things about this semester that make me so excited to be in a learning environment. I'm taking three courses in my majors ... Playwriting, 20th Century British Literature, and the Literature of Lewis and Tolkien. I could not be happier! Each of these classes holds such interest for me that I yearn to eat up everything taught and just suck it all in. But with upper level classes come upper level workloads ---- reading galour, writing due every week, presentations up the ying yang. Since I hold such a high standard for myself and since I love each of these courses, I really want to do well... and so this means that I will be devoting myself to my studies. Okay, so far busy, but managable. But this semester I also have two other courses that I don't really care about ---- Reformational Theology and French. Oof. Okay, in defense of these classes, both of them are interesting, I'm glad for the opportunity to be taking them and in their own light, they are surely necessary, but they also eat up the time that I need for my upper classes that are in my majors -- what I'm here at Redeemer to study. Add on top of this that I am in the mainstage performance this semester -- which is called NZR.. it's a play that the performers (me included) are writing and acting based on the story of Nebuchadnezzar -- and that I am the TA for the English dept. as well as that I am the Editor-in-Chief of 'The Minstrel' -- Redeemer's Literary Magazine ....... and that, ladies and gents, is a deadly semester. This is why education and I have such a love hate relationship. I love to learn, so I lap up every opportunity I can.... but while I'm actually learning, I nearly kill myself trying to get everything done and my faith life suffers. I have some help this semester in that I'm helping write a play based on the Bible and I'm taking Ref. Theology... but education and the strain of deadlines and papers and presentations and the copius amounts of reading do not make for an easy faith life. I should push myself and put my priorities elsewhere... but that's extremely hard when in the environment.
Hmm... I wish I could expand on this more but I've spent too much time on this --- I should get back to my reading before people come back home and there's no silence in which to peacefully read. Oh how I love it when reading Lord of the Rings is homework....