I am not a teacher. Teaching was never a part of my plan. In fact, towards the end of my junior year of high school when there was pressure to figure out what I wanted to study, teaching was among the top ten things I never wanted to do. I took many surveys and quizzes that were supposed to help you narrow down the possibilities and every time without fail, the result was always teacher. Despite this evidence I still came to the conclusion that teaching was not for me. At the time, I was helping out in a second grade Sunday School class. I enjoyed working with the kids as long as I didn’t have to be the one to teach them. Then one day the teacher had to step out of the room in the middle of the lesson. On the way out the door she handed me the lesson plan. I remember looking out at the children sitting in the desks in front of me. I looked down at the lesson plan that I held in my shaking hand. I hated talking in front of groups, but it looked like I had no choice. I took a deep breath and then I taught. Before I knew it the lesson plan was no longer in my hand and I was just following the flow of classroom discussion. Everything about that moment felt natural. I knew, then and there, that teaching was one of my gifts. Since then I have been a teacher. I was a Sunday School teacher for the remainder of high school, then I went to college to study teaching. In the process it became a huge part of who I was. Everything I did revolved around teaching from collecting books for my future classrooms to my Pinterest boards full of ideas.
This month, as the new school year starts back home, we are literally living at a rural school outside of Quelimane, Mozambique. Unfortunately, I have not been able to spend much time in the classrooms. Nonetheless, being this close to the classroom has made me realize how much I need to grieve the loss of this school year. When I left for The Race teaching was the hardest things that I had to walk away from, but I knew that God was calling me away from it on purpose. One of my biggest fears coming on the race was that God would call me out of teaching. That teaching would be something I would have to surrender forever. Since starting The Race, God has been showing me a lot about my identity, and I have realized that teaching has become too much of my identity. I have put “being a teacher” above my identity as God’s daughter. I know now that God has asked me to sacrifice teaching for this period of time. It is something I have had to submit to him – lay it down at his feet in order to seek him with all my heart.
At the end of Month Two someone on the squad wrote me a letter that said, “be”. I was very confused at the time. What on earth could this single, two letter word mean? However, now I know that this is my time to just simply be. Be what he created me to be. Yes, he has gifted me with talents, but first and foremost he has called me to be His. I am not a teacher. I am someone who has been given the gift of teaching, but that is not my identity. He created me to be His daughter. I can rest in the assurance that I will get to go back to teaching one day. That the gifts He gave me will not go to waste, but that when I go back things will be different. I will be rooted and established in His love and because of this I will be able to give His love, grace, forgiveness, compassion, etc. to others. People will notice that something is different and I will stand out. Not because of me, but because of Christ who is at work within me.
