This morning, as I was–once again–sitting in someone else's classroom as a substitute teacher, I was struck by…life.
Because that used to be my classroom. In the first semester out of college, I was called about three weeks into the school year to temporarily take over for a teacher that had left for another job. After four years of reading novels and short stories and poems and writing about characterization and personification and symbolism, I had finally gotten an opportunity to teach.
Biology. Chemistry. Physics.
And I took it. Because I probably would have taken anything. And I worked pretty hard for the rest of the semester to make up for the content knowledge that I lacked.
That was two years ago, and this morning as I was sitting in that classroom, substituting for the teacher (who was actually qualified for the job), I thought about how much happens in two years. And how much different everything seems now.
It's all about perspective.
My perspective then was a college graduate, excited about everything: the opportunity to have her own job, her own classroom. Finally. After spending so much time in the classrooms of other teachers.
Two years later, with a couple semesters of substituting and another semester of teaching science under my belt, it's amazing to me how much can change in so little time. And how everything can change and still kind of be the same. How much I can change and still kind of be the same.
When I was thinking about perspective, I was reminded of this set of stairs where I went to college. I was sitting on a window ledge on day by those stairs that I had climbed almost everyday on the way to class, and I had this memory of orientation week when I was sitting on those same stairs with a friend. I had never been to the top of them. I had never seen what was beyond them. We were sitting there, and it all seemed so cool and surreal because we were going to be in college. It was going to be a big deal. I wasn't really thinking about all of the things that college was going to hold. We were just thinking about the big picture. Being in college. By the time I was reading on the window ledge, those stairs had lost their coolness, their surreal-ness. They had become just another obstacle on my way to class.
The stairs were the same. It was all about my perspective.
I say all of this mostly to say: Right now I don't have that many expectations about the coming year of my life. I don't really spend a lot of time thinking about how things are going to change or what I'm going to be doing or even where I'm actually going to be a year from now. I'm just thinking about the big picture. The World Race. I'm going on the World Race. I'm going to 11 countries in 11 months.
And just like before I went to college, I'm excited about meeting new and different people and having new and different experiences and seeing God work in new and different ways than I have seen before.
I'm anxious about living with new and different people and adjusting to new and different experiences and seeing God work in new and different ways.
I'm still just kind of sitting on the stairs of The World Race: January 2014: Route 3 for the first time.
And that makes me wonder about a moment in the future when I realize that my perspective has changed. When I'm metaphorically sitting in my old classroom again under different circumstances or reading on a window ledge and realize that I have conquered the stairs.
