false starts and new beginnings

Oh goodness. I feel pulled in many directions—adjusting to apartment life, grocery shopping and doing dishes and negotiating roommates who are decidedly different from each other; life at school, getting to know the kids and lesson planning and trying to write fast enough on the board to keep up with what I’m saying. (I’m finding that is an art form.) Somehow in the span of seven days, I have said goodbye to the church that I’ve attended since freshman year of college, survived a tornado warning that lasted an entire night, realized my entire lesson plan was falling apart, and, as the culmination of the week, forgot my bag in the classroom and had to call my teacher to let me back in—barely making it out of the parking lot only to get pulled over for speeding. I’ve spent a lot of time this week wondering what I’m doing, how I even think I can handle myself in the classroom and the real world. My teacher put it beautifully when she said, after I had told her at least part of what I was thinking after a frantic, rushed lesson last Tuesday, that this pull I feel is because I’m thinking so hard about everything that is muscle memory to the teachers I’m around. Everything takes time and energy and feels new, and for now, my goal is to make it step by step and somehow see the beauty of this week. Because it was there, and sometimes, the hard and beautiful parts of this week were mere minutes apart.

One of the beautiful parts of this week is the gaggle of eleven year olds with whom I get to spend a rather large proportion of my waking hours. I can already feel my heart binding to the beautiful fifth grade souls placed in my care. I am finding that it is possible to both be incredibly annoyed with a child and also love them fiercely—in two weeks, I have felt both at the same time so many times. I have felt what it’s like to not want to be anywhere else and also what it’s like to be this close to running for the hills. I have acted incredibly strong when I felt achingly weak and cried in a bathroom only to come out and grin at everyone around me. This is incredibly hard and complicated work. Who knows it would be so hard to teach one subject, let alone five or six every day? I love these kids enough to embarrass myself every day trying to teach them, to do what’s best for them when they groan and sigh over the books I spent hours scrounging for. I want to give my students the world but on their end, it just looks like more homework I pile on top of them. I want to please people. I want them to like me, to recognize what I do for them and my desire for them, and I’m realizing that I really need to set that aside for these kids.  I switched groups around for them once this week because it felt like half of them, including my strongest readers, hated the books I chose for them—and I still got complaints. I still got two kids who somehow misheard the directions to rank their books 1 through 4 from most to least preferred, did it backwards and got the book they least wanted. On Friday, I realized that I’m not going to please all of these kids all the time, and that’s not my job. My job is to teach them, and sometimes I will have to do so in less than ideal circumstances with books and knowledge and tools I would do anything to exchange. I have to make the best out of what I have and pray that God will fill the gap.

Another week of the good, the bad, and the ugly is behind me now, and I’m looking at a new week, a new beginning. This week, I get to welcome some of my favorite people back home on campus. I get to dive into four books I think are really cool and see whatever projects students bring in that will be so much more fun than any role sheet. They get their time to show off their talents and talk about a book that, who knows, they might actually really like. I have my concerns—a kid who is new, who apparently had quite the past and didn’t get the book he wanted. My fear is that he will withdraw, that he will close up after having adjusted so well to a new school because he didn’t get the book he wanted. I’m afraid that exactly the same thing will happen this week that happened last week, that the class will decide AGAIN that they don’t like the book they chose and expect me to cater to them again. I’m afraid they don’t take me seriously or see me as a teacher yet. I’m afraid that I won’t be able to discipline well, that I’ll get behind on my lesson plans and disappoint my teacher, that my apartment will not be able to handle five very different women living together…but I don’t live under fear. These fears that I have are not the end. Maybe they’ll happen, maybe they won’t, but I know that I am equipped with the strength I’ll need for the day. I know that my God will show up in unlikely places and broken people, that sometimes the unyielding strength comes from crippling weakness.

It’s been a good weekend, and with a new week comes a new beginning.People have been moving in and it feels like coming home. I’ve been reminded that I am surrounded by people who care, people who look a lot like Jesus and seen by a God who knows my needs before I know them. I am carried and graced and highly favored. This week, my goal is not to get it right. My goal is not to have all the answers and master the schedule and time management and do the right thing all the time, but to show up and let myself be drawn to need. To sit in it, to sit with students who don’t understand, who are frustrated and tired, who are finally feeling the effects of a new school and all new people. The honeymoon period of a new school is ending—I can feel it—and my goal this week is to not shy away from that. My goal is to lean into weakness and brokenness, to hear hearts and act accordingly…even if it looks completely different from what I think I’m “supposed’ to be doing. There is always more going on than meets the eye. I don’t see everything and I don’t know everything, but I’m here, and, right now, that’s enough.

when not enough...is enough

So this week my new life as a college senior started--in the span of several days, I have packed up my life in Michigan, arrived and unpacked in a brand new apartment, and met a large percentage of the school community who will be such a huge part of my life for the next two months. 

My first morning in my new school opened with meeting twenty something people in the span of several minutes, followed by these words in a prayer from the school principal:

God, we are not up to the task…and that is a good thing.

The rest of the prayer was great from what I heard—it’s amazing to hear people you don’t know pray out loud in a genuine, loving way—but with those thirteen words, an invisible weight was lifted from my shoulders that I hadn’t quite realized I was carrying. I have come to believe something I heard said once—that everyone has a particular burden to carry unique to them, their temperament and experience—and part of my unique battle is this fear of being not enough. This plays out in a variety of ways—in my academics, relationship with my family, friends, roommates, colleagues, and as of late with my students and the work of becoming a teacher.  This fear is in no way helped by the fact of who I am—the klutzy, absentminded part of me who is always dropping, spilling or breaking something. Basically, I often take the harder road and spend a lot of time climbing mountains and feeling really stupid when they turn out to be molehills. When I got here yesterday, I unpacked my car over the span of four hours because I got some stuff out of my car, went to Subway to get lunch, only to realize that my wallet was not actually IN my purse. Immediately, on the verge of a panic attack, I turned around to come back to campus, called Walmart and Campus Safety with no luck, tore my apartment apart, wondering what kind of senior/student teacher I would make if I couldn’t find my wallet. I lifted a box a few minutes later and found it exactly where I had left it a few minutes earlier.

I am very much a work in progress, and I’m coming to terms with my strengths and weaknesses, recognizing that God made me exactly the way he meant for me to be—but some days are easier than others. Walking into a building where I knew no one beyond a few emails and texts over the summer, spending eight hours in a room full of almost strangers is a bit of a stretch. I’ve grown a lot and I’m much more trusting and optimistic about these situations now than when I was, say, a freshman, but even without knowing it, walking into school yesterday, my hackles were up. Without a single conscious thought or acknowledgement, I found myself walking into that school with a determination to prove myself worthy. It affected what I chose to wear, what I brought to school today, how I presented myself. I don’t think it showed or negatively affected anything that happened, but that opening line in a simple morning prayer took me aback and adjusted the way I approached the day. It took me several minutes to find my way out of that hackles up, defenses at the ready mindset, that determination to show the world that I am good enough, and I think I have to talk myself out of that daily. After twenty something years in this skin, coming to terms with who I am—the good, the bad, and the messy—involves a long process of leaning into and learning from my insufficiency without letting it define me. To acknowledge without putting myself down that I still have a long way to go; in my desperate grasp for control, for appearing confident in a new situation where I am anything but, for occasionally failing to ask questions until it’s too late. I still don’t know how to show anger or hurt or sadness in front of a group of students in a way that is healthy and spurs growth. Not to mention I don’t know this school or these people—names, where the gym or cafeteria is, what the schedule is like.  

And yet, after admitting weakness, unpreparedness on his part and that of the school, what came out of the mouth of this man next was a reminder that God shows himself most clearly in my weakness. Entering that school this morning, next week, next month, in anything other than weakness, an acknowledgement that in and of myself, I am not sufficient for the demands and challenges of this year is a way of deceiving myself and others, and I’m realizing that I don’t want that. It’s not fair to me, the teachers and staff I met today, my roommates, the kids I’m about to meet on Monday, and it breaks the heart of God. Because my God chooses the weak, the meek, the mild to do his best work, and I always forget that. It is the weak ones, the ones who come to God and whatever situation with hands empty and open who become key players in God’s redeeming work. I was never intended to get through this life on my own strength. I sing it, pray it, say it, but I’m praying that this year and beyond I believe and live it. God does his best work in and through men and women whose only relevant qualification is that He chose them. They needed nothing other than that knowledge and the wisdom provided to them. Even in writing that, I want to qualify that statement with affirming again how important pedagogy and details and preparation is, and to some extent that is true, but it’s not the foundation. The heart of what I’m about to do, the work of my hands and my mind this semester will be that in Christ, I am enough. In Him, I find the resources, the strength, the experience and content knowledge that I need to do this well. Anything else is a bonus. That, I think, is what I love most about my new school. Even before the kids walk in the door, the first thing the principal does is acknowledge that they are not ready, that they will be surprised and challenged and stretched. That they will come up short and be carried by grace. For whatever reason, this is both incredibly hard to swallow and immensely comforting to believe. I sit tonight simultaneously humbled and graced in my weaknesses, and with Paul, I can pray over this semester that my competence comes from God Himself (2 Cor 3:5).