Back to the Office, Back to Rest

August is the cruelest… no, I won’t start that way.

I always dread a little bit coming back to the office after a long summer. ?Coming around the next corner, always, will be the colleague who is ready to tell me about his summer sitting on the back porch, polishing off a hundred pages an afternoon of his reading for comprehensive exams, or the colleague who has drafted three full dissertation chapters since we parted in May. ?And although relatively few of them mean me any particular malice, the question will always come: was my summer productive?

And honestly, I’m usually in a good enough mood simply to say that, with a small child and a wife who’s also a teacher, summer’s the time when I’m productive in ways completely invisible to the academy. ?That’s usually where I leave off, though subvocally I’m remembering mornings in the back yard teaching my son to put a wiffle ball on a line-drive course over our fence, trips to Fort Yargo State Park to go swimmin’ at the beach (and a pox on any of you who just thought that a lake is not the real beach–it is to my son!), the long ten-hour drive up to Indiana to visit my grandmother for the last time before she dies of cancer, the weeks that we spent helping Mary’s parents recover from their car wreck, the hours spent preparing for and teaching VBS at our church, our vacation to Atlanta where I once again remembered the greatness of Creation as I beheld the giants in the Georgia Aquarium and where Micah just enjoyed swimmin’ in the hotel pool, the long hours getting the house ready for a new baby, and all the other things that I packed into those two and a half short months. ?It was a good summer and a sad summer, but no, I’ve not gotten much farther on my Spenser chapter.

That said, it’s a good thing to be back in an office. ?It’s not the same one I packed up back in May (it’s much bigger, and I don’t have to share it), but as I unboxed my books and set up my environment as I like it, I could feel myself getting back into the groove–I’ve got syllabi to write and workshops to plan, dissertation notes to forge into academic prose and new coursework in composition theory to engage. ?And I’ve got blog posts to write. ?I’m going to have much more professional responsibility between August and May than I did between May and August, but I’m also going to be “at work” while my son and wife are “at school,” and that means I’m going to have solitude, for the most part, in greater shares than I had during those hottest months. ?I’m finally going to write that review of Yoder’s book on Just War doctrine, the multi-part post that I’ve been scheming on about the use of hamartia in 1 John, and perhaps even some ongoing commentary about this fall’s teen ministry project that I’ve started drafting. ?As I drove to the office this morning I was missing the summer, but by the time lunch break came around (I ate office in my lunch, but I did leave the office to go and retrieve said lunch), I was back in the groove and loving it.

I’m sure that most people who genuinely enjoy their work get some joy out of its rhythms, and today, with the changing of seasons and with a new baby coming ’round the corner, I’m glad to be a professor. ?And now that I have some time to think, I might even get some writing done.