just a wednesday

Today, a Wednesday, is no special event.

Though it is Spring Break, the Office of Student Life persists tirelessly in preparation of the post-break wave of involvement. Several weeks ago, I was strangely (if not typically) ambitious and decided to design and implement a new set of service projects for Spring Break. I was thinking it could be the other Spring Break alternative, you know? So many people take flight for this short week, impatient to forget the local roots in a search for sun, adventure, and the infamous road trip.

So, three themes emerged: environment conservation, housing equality, and homelessness. Yesterday was environment... and we made the short trek to the nearby nature preserve to prepare the way for a natural spring to gurgle up from underground. We were quite a mess by day's end, but there is something purely human about working with hands (by design, I'm sure).

So today, a Wednesday, was spent at the single resident occupancy housing development... learning about affordable housing and placing toiletries, irons, ironing boards, and alarm clocks into the rooms.

Tomorrow will be spent serving breakfast to the homeless at 13th and Lavaca, then back to campus to make homeless care packages for those panhandlers on Ben White, IH-35, and at that dreadful triangle by Mopac.

There's really nothing magical about it. It's just doing what needs doing. I guess it's strange then, this need to explain. It's less an addition to life and more the stuff of it.

My grandparents went to a revival last night. And I think that's the stuff of life, too. I wonder why we think they are exceptions. Service and revival, could that be indeed what it is all about?