Nervous Breakdown and Coffee Shop Productivity

This morning I opted out of going to church, as I woke up tired from a restless night's sleep...I wasn't feeling too great last night for some reason (actually, probably related to the giant bag of M&Ms I consumed during "The King's Speech"), and when the alarm sounded around seven o'clock, I chose more sleep over church.  I felt rather guilty...but there it is.

In other news, I had one of those "you're-not-strong-enough-to-be-in-a-career-in-ministry" / "why-the-heck-are-you-in-seminary" / "who-do-you-think-you-are-to-be-qualified-to-lead-people-in-their-spiritual-lives" breakdowns this morning.  It spawned from a realization that there was no way on earth that I was going to have the intellectual stamina to get through over 100 pages of reading for Tuesday's class, answer a bunch of questions pertaining to said reading (so I can email them in ahead of time and look good), do all of my class reading for tomorrow's class, post something intelligent on Blackboard for my church history class, and get a good start on my New Testament paper in one day.  No way in heaven or hell (maybe heaven, but as much time as I spend studying God-related things, I've been having significant trouble connecting with God in the personal realm lately).  And so, I did the natural and appropriate thing in such circumstances: I changed my Facebook status to something about not being cut out for ministry, and sat on my couch and cried.  Luckily for me (unluckily for them), my parents called right at the onset of the cry-fest for our usual Sunday chat, and offered some comfort and general distraction.

White Rock Coffee: Unassuming
But Awesome

After the phone call, I decided I needed to get out of the apartment.  I was a little weary of doing so after yesterday's debacle with the Dallas public realm, but my apartment was turning back into a hobbit hole of despair.  Going out into the world was necessary to maintain sanity.  So I got up, wiped remaining tears from my eyes, got dressed, and packed my laptop and textbooks up and took myself out to White Rock Coffee, a local coffee shop about a 7 or 8 minute drive from my apartment.  The beautiful thing about choosing this particular location was that it required me to drive AWAY from downtown...meaning in the opposite direction of all the Super Bowl fanatics flooding the Dallas area with their cheese hats and Steelers paraphernalia.  The fact that I encountered no crazy drivers on the way there put me in a good mood, and once I got inside the coffee shop and ordered myself a cafe au lait and set up shop for productivity, I got some serious work done.  I banged out answers to the education-reading reflection questions that had sparked the tears earlier (taking my mother's advice and "schmoozing" my way through...she studied education herself, so she knows what she's talking about).  That took about an hour and a half.  

Inside....Oozes Productivity

Then, feeling schmoozed out, I opted to do some CCFOF work instead of jumping into my NT paper.  THAT was a very good idea.  My job has ups and downs in terms of interest level of my assigned tasks, and right now it's DEFINITELY at a high point.  I have lots of things to do, and none of them seem pointless, and they're all a good change of pace and allow for creativity and correspondence with people all over the world.  I've actually been motivating a fair number of people to be prayer group leaders for this year's prayer campaign.  People email me random questions about stuff, and I turn it around on them to tell them how this or that would make them an AWESOME prayer group leader.  It's kind of fun.  In fact, YOU should be one.  I'm kidding...but really, you could be...You read my blog, after all, and what better way to get a feel for what I do in my work than to get involved???  Am I right???

OK, so anyway, after my 3 hours or so of productivity, I returned to the apartment very hungry (the coffee house baked goods are out of my realm of healthy eating at the present), and made a dinner of chicken, couscous, and green beans.  It was tasty.  Then, as the rest of the world tuned into the Super Bowl, I punched out a fairly good outline for my New Testament paper.  It still needs a good deal of work, but it's getting somewhere.  After the Super Bowl ended, I watched the new episode of Glee (yay!), and after THAT ended I spent FOREVER trying to plan out a healthy menu for this week so I can go grocery shopping tomorrow morning.  Cooking healthy is more expensive than cooking unhealthy, and that makes finding recipes very difficult when you're trying to keep to a budget.  I also don't have anything stocked up in my kitchen, because I've only gone shopping once since getting back from winter break, and the week of snow further cleaned out my cupboard.  It's frustrating, but I'll have food to eat besides chicken again.  If anyone has cheap, healthy recipes, send them my way...

I'm WAY past the midnight bedtime because grocery-list making took so long, and of course I have to post on the blog.  So sweet dreams everyone...I'll report back here again tomorrow.