A Time for Hope

This week’s snow has complicated the end of the semester. Students, faculty and staff scramble to make adjustments, finding new ways to do the work that needs doing. Hopes of a smooth end to the semester are replaced by dogged determination just to do what needs to be done.

Instead of meeting with my students for Monday’s final exam, I am sitting in front of my fireplace watching video presentations they have shared with me on my Google drive.  I’ll read their uploaded documents rather than hand-written entries in blue books.

Endings are often messy. We find ourselves in unexpected circumstances or filled with laments of “I should’ve” and “I meant to.”

Living as we do in a calendar year marked by semesters, we get an ending and the hope of a new beginning in just a few weeks. We can put the old semester behind us and start anew—new classes, more books, a kaleidoscope of different people to interact with, a fresh perspective. It’s a clean slate. What is done is done. Expectation and hope mark what is to come.

The liturgical calendar inspires this same sense of hope and renewal. Many religious traditions have similar beginnings that involve newness, renewal and expectation. From my Christian perspective, this season of Advent, which marks the beginning of the church year, is much like the start of a new semester. It is a time full of hope and excited anticipation.

Before I shift my gaze to the new semester, I need to keep my eyes on what is in front of me—papers, exams, grades. I resolve to do these end-of-term tasks to the best of my ability—even if things are not as I expected.

If you, too, find yourself muddling through to the semester’s end, remember the circle of time that brings into being all things new. The semester will end and a new one awaits. Advent anticipates the coming of the Christ child. With his birth, the promise of redemption is the hope we receive.

Nina