Responsibility is Yucky

I’m on seminary teaching duty again this week, and last night presented itself with a problem. The whole day, the weather forecast had been for 1-3 inches of snow, starting around 8am or so. No big deal. Then last night I checked the weather one more time, and they’d upped it to a storm advisory and were bandying around numbers like 4-6 inches and starting at 5am. That’s a much bigger deal, in my Honda Civic driving eyes. We don’t hold early morning seminary if school is delayed or canceled, but who knew what would happen in the morning. My thinking was that I’d rather cancel the night before if it looked doubtful–going on the theory that the worst case scenario would be we ended up with no snow at all, but everyone got to sleep in an hour longer.

Yay!

And of course that’s exactly what happened. The forecast drifted back to a later start and smaller amounts over the night, and I woke up (TWO hours later, since it’s my night shift and I didn’t have to get up early for work) to feel kind of like an idiot for having canceled. Perhaps it would have been better to make an audible in the morning, but the thought of calling people at 5:30am is something I don’t particularly relish. I can do phone calls when I have to (I’m a big boy like that), but I loathe making calls when I think I might be disturbing people.

The thing is, I know exactly how I’d feel if I were a parent or a student, and the teacher had canceled seminary. I’d be really happy. We don’t have to make up the day–there’s no real “loss,” here–other than me having to try and cram more material into tomorrow. But because I was the one who had to have the responsibility for making “the call,” I can’t help feeling guilty. Like I should have tried harder.

Don’t get me wrong–I think I’ll sleep just fine tonight. I just thought it was an interesting observation–how being on two sides of the same decision can make me feel two very different emotions. Which leads me to my conclusion that responsibility is yucky.

Happy Monday!

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