GUEST POST!
Ladies and gentlemen, this month in Costa Rica, we are working and living in a bi-lingual school that doubles as a church. It’s AWESOME. But I, being of sound mind and very little experience teaching in a formal setting, asked my best friend, Kelly, who is the world’s BEST teacher (okay, yes, you might have detected a little bias there) to write a blog about teaching and faith and our friendship and how awesome Jesus is.
I present to you Kelly’s blog:
A few weeks ago, Sarah asked me to “guest-write” (not her exact words, but I’m improvising) for her World Race blog. Her team is currently living and working in a school in Costa Rica. Minus the “Costa Rica” part of that statement, this is the story of my life. I’m a sixth grade language arts and social studies teacher at an average-sized middle school in Hickory, North Carolina. Looking at that sentence, I’m overcome with absolute boredom because… let’s be honest for a second… you’re accustomed to reading about Sarah’s awesome, inspiring stories about missions in far-off places, and you’ve simply been left with a teacher from a small town. Well, (I say this with a tad bit of sarcasm and a lot of hope) you’re about to get schooled!
I always wanted to be a teacher. Always. I can’t remember a time in my life where I didn’t feel a calling to teach. It wasn’t until this current school year that I acknowledged that calling went hand-in-hand with my innate calling to spread the love of Jesus. It’s been my own amazing journey, and I’m so grateful that I get to share it with you.
When Sarah left in August, I was utterly depressed. She’s been my best friend for about six years. We had a hard and long journey to cultivating a friendship. We got in this massive fight as sixth graders (ironic, I know) over a boy, and though we were friendly to each other for the next six years, we never really took the time to repair and nurture our friendship the way we should have. Can you imagine? – Two twelve year olds were incapable of adequately expressing their feelings. Time passed though, and over Heart of Darkness, Michael Buble, Olive Garden, and prom dress shopping, we found a friendship that I could never live without. We spent our college days getting mildly frustrated with each other and ourselves over our extremely booked schedules, and consequently, our inability to communicate and see each other. Oh, but boy, the joy that commenced when we were together. Those memories are the ones I hold on to when I need to laugh or feel loved. I couldn’t ask for a better friend.
Having said all that, August was rough. I was apprehensive about my second year of teaching, every man I knew (for lack of better word) sucked, and my relationship with God was way out of whack. To top all this off, my best friend was leaving me for a year. I was selfish, and I cried about it more than I should have. I never took the time to pray about those feelings. I never tried to work them out with God. I was angry and depressed.
And then God, once again, sent me Sarah.
Before Sarah left for The World Race, she left me a book by Shauna Neiquist called Cold Tangerines. This is a wonderful book about finding God’s grace in the most unexpected places. There’s a consistent theme (or central idea – for all my teacher readers – I see you, Common Core!) about using our lives to show God’s love in everything we do. It’s also about acknowledging God’s love in the simplest forms. God’s love is around us every, single day, and often, we just don’t take the time to see it. I was definitely one of those people, and God convicted me in so many ways as I poured over this book each morning before I went to work. I read a chapter in Cold Tangerines almost every week day morning since Sarah left, and I just finished it this morning. It has taught me so much about myself and my ability to see and show God’s love. And lucky for me, I have the perfect job that allows me to do this.
Teaching is hard. For anyone who teaches, you know how difficult the day can be when you’re still trying to sort through a new curriculum, when you have kids that don’t care about the work they’re doing, when parents disagree with your practices, or when you feel that there’s SO MUCH pressure on you that at any point, you’ll burst. It’s hard, and most days, it’s not fun. But that’s not the “cold tangerines” attitude that we need to get through the day. And that’s not the attitude that I think God wants us to have, especially when we’re dealing with children. I want to see the joy, the life, and the beauty that school holds… that children hold… that the “It is good” world that God has given us holds.
I see approximately ninety children every day for one-hundred eighty days of the year. Every day, these children come in with baggage (both literally and figuratively). There are children who do not have happy home lives. There are children that have lost their soccer game the night before. There are children who were bullied on the bus moments before they walk into my classroom. The list could go on forever. What I find so ironic is that there are not two children out of that ninety that are feeling and experiencing the exact same thing at the exact same time. They’re completely different in every single aspect, yet people often lump them together as hormonal eleven-year-olds and move on with their day.
What if God did that to us?
I like to think of my classroom as a community. We support each other, and we face similar problems together, as a unit. That message is sometimes lost to the students I teach, but I look at our lives this way…. Every day we (yes, myself included) walk into the same situation, baggage and all. We’ve arrived with the purpose (chosen or not) to gather new content and information and shape that content into some kind of shared understanding. Our purpose is often derailed by our attitude or our experiences, and we get lost in negative energy.
As a teacher, I put the tools and materials students need in front of them, but I don’t show them how to complete the task they need to complete. God does the same for us. Every day, God puts content in front of us and he asks us to shape it. He throws papers and babies and death and burnt food and parties and bad television and a leaky faucet in front of us and he asks to make it into something else. He wants us to deal with the cards we’ve been dealt. He’s not cruel about it, it’s just fact, and our actions, our baggage, and our experiences will dictate how we deal with that content when it should be our faith. We should take on this “cold tangerines” attitude and decide we’re going to find God’s grace and beauty within this one seemingly terrible thing, and we’re going to make the best of it.
My career has allowed me to see more of God’s grace than I ever thought I would. I ask children to come into class every day and do their work despite any other issues they may have. And they will do it, or I’ll throw a silent lunch their way or call their parents. Yet every day, we live our lives, and we don’t always follow God’s will. But he won’t give us a silent lunch or tell or parents or send us to the office with a pink slip. He’ll forgive us. Isn’t that amazing?
I’m very thankful for this revelation. This odd series of events (which I’m sure doesn’t translate well on paper) has led me to see God’s grace in the oddest places. It’s my own “cold tangerine.” I’m so thankful that God plucked me from a state of depression, that he brought me Sarah and Shauna Neiquist, and that he allowed me to see his grace through this immense calling that I call my career.
As Sarah serves in a school for the remainder of this month, I hope that you pray for her. I hope that she and her team continue to see God’s grace in everything they do.
Love,
Kelly
