The Quietness of Finals Week

It is Tuesday of Finals week here in Gainesville and honestly this campus is like a ghost town. The students that are here are locked away in the library or their dorm room or somewhere away from Facebook and text messages if such a place actually exists. The student center is eerily quiet. So much so that I can hear Carmen our janitor shuffling along while he is cleaning the upstairs at the far end of the building.
The traffic outside is even manageable today. And in the last three hours there has not been one siren blaring emergency vehicle speeding down university avenue. That my friends may be the biggest Christmas miracle of all! If only they were not working on the substructure right outside our building, this would have the makings for a very peaceful day.
The only problem is that I miss the chaos. I miss the usual suspects running through the building. The folks playing boggy-pong in the game room making those loud noises when a great shot is made or somebody gets pegged really hard bring the building to life. The subtle snoring sounds of freshmen asleep on the couches out front. Not to pick on the freshmen but the upperclassmen have discovered the upstairs couches so as not to be disturbed until their ipods or cell phone clocks provide the needed wake up service. It is almost lunch time and I doubt we hear the almost daily banter about where should one go for a good lunch or at least some good comfort food.
The quiet and my restlessness with it reminds me of why I love my job. I really enjoy the daily interaction with the students. I miss the laughter and the tears at times. I miss their questions, even if the less than intelligent ones sometimes drive me crazy. I miss it because I know that the quiet of finals week means there are some of the students that I may never see again. That is a bad thing most of the time! It means that another semester is coming to an end which means I have less time with some of my favorite students and my daughter who is a student here and my son who is graduate student here along with his new wife. I know that there is one less semester to influence students to grow in Christ and live in community with one another.
But the good news is that if the Lord allows me to live three more weeks, we get to start a whole new semester. With new challenges ahead and new questions to be explored, it brings with it a fresh wind of the Spirit. So I can endure the few days of quiet which lead to a couple of weeks of vacation because of the hope and promise of the Spring semester! Which is probably when I will next post an entry unless something major happens in the meantime.

So if you read this I hope you have a Merry Christmas and a Very Happy New Year! Oh and Go Gators, beat Cincy!