Tag Archives: grace

A Very Small Story (with a Moral)

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This morning I came into my classroom, made tea, and sat down with a senior to help her with her thesis topic. The chairs were up on tables for the floor to be cleaned the night before, so we just took two down, because that was all we needed.

Part-way through our meeting, a sophomore boy who’s in the elective that meets first hour in my room came in to leave his things there. I said hello, and went back to my conversation. Five or ten minutes later, when the senior girl left, armed (I hope) with revision ideas, I looked up and saw that all the chairs were down. “Did you do that?” I asked him. He shrugged and said yes. I thanked him and he disappeared back out into the hall.

Not only do they clean the floors on Monday, but on Tuesday night as well. Usually I try to remember to ask the kids in my last hour to put them up, but they were very invested in the review game we were playing today, so I let class run right up to the bell, and by the time I remembered about the chairs, the room had cleared out. I began to put them up alone, one by one, silently berating myself for not asking for help when I had it available to me.

Then I looked up to see that two of my juniors were still left packing their things, and two more who I didn’t even have today had wandered in for unknown reasons. Without my requesting help, or the kids even asking if I needed it, they all began to put chairs on tables, juggling their book-bags and binders. The job was done in ten seconds, and by the time I thanked them, they were all already out my door again. They didn’t acknowledge their own kindness.

This is a very small thing, smaller than small, but I haven’t really stopped thinking about it since. I was even distracted from grading freshman papers tonight because I was remembering.

I think there are two reasons that it had such weight for me. First, I am tired, and I have had a hard week or two. Kindness means most when you need it most.

But more than that, help was offered to me so freely, without expectation of anything in return, not even gratitude or recognition. I love my students, and they are often sweet and pleasant, but this reflexive willingness to immediately and unassumingly fill whatever inauspicious need is placed in front of them–this is rare, both among teenagers and among people in general. To see such a virtue active and growing in them moves me more than they can know. When my students are able to step out into the world as that kind of salt and light, they’ll certainly have far surpassed everything I have to teach them, regardless of what they know about comma placement or the cotton gin.

God is good.

Deepening Ruts

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Two years ago, for a full school year, I wrote a poem once a week, always on a Monday. Why I chose Monday, I don’t know, except perhaps for the fact that Mondays were the worst days for it, so I’d get the best poems, ‘cause I’d have a lot of feelings. The only rule was that the poems must be addressed to God. I stopped when summer came, and have written inconsistently since, so I only have a handful more, but so often I find myself going back and reading over those lines in that green moleskine, especially in the past few months. Many of them are sloppily constructed, and some of them don’t contain anything of value at all, but a handful of them are true. I managed somehow to wraps words around God’s gifts and hand them back. I read them now and I am reminded. I am reminded of my Lord’s steadfast faithfulness whenever I am lost, and lost, and lost again. Apparently we can bear witness of the truth not only to others, but to ourselves.

I have sometimes done the same thing with these blog entries, wandering back to re-read the things I learned three or four years before. Coming to understand the Gospel, Jesus’s good news for us, is not so much a series of revelations as a deepening of grooves, a learning of the same things over and over, only heavier and more each time.

And as I read over these last few entries, I think that in a roundabout way, I have been trying to talk about beauty. Of course I have always believed that God speaks to us through beauty. You’re supposed to believe that when you read and write for fun, and make other people read and write for a living. You’re supposed to believe that when you’re me. But only recently, I think, have I really begun to understand beauty as something that I am surrounded by, that will teach me about the God who made it, who delighted in it first, who called it good.

So, though it’s small, I will just tell you this: I have learned recently that beauty is the moon still hanging gossamer in the sky at seven-thirty in the morning while I drive to school, like a disk of stretched lace, mislaid in the thick blue.

And I believe that next time I come back to read this, I will have learned beauty just a little more.

Measurements

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If I were to tell you briefly what I miss most about studenthood, I would tell you that I miss all the measurements. I miss the measurements because back when I had them, they could tell me how I was doing. The grades told me I was doing well, or I was doing alright, or sometimes they told me “Oh no!” The comments I received along with the grades gave me other measuring words: “Excellent analysis” “Adequate reading” “Very poor introduction.” But my favorite was the way that for a student everything, good, adequate, or poor, came to an end: years, semesters, classes, papers, projects. Everything reached a point where it was finished, polished and shiny, ready to become my ancient history. I used to love the moment when they passed out the test and you put your notes under the desk: whether I had studied for fifteen minutes (which was not enough) or three hours (which, frankly, was rare) there was nothing more I could do now. I knew what I knew, and not what I didn’t. I found it easy to be a philosopher when it was up to others to decide the value of my work.

But now it is hard. I have a great deal of freedom in my job, and I am grateful for this, but it means that much of the time I am my own judge, jury, and occasionally executioner. Each day I come in, and for lack of anyone else to constantly measure me, I become the fly on my own wall as I make curriculum decisions, pacing decisions, policy decisions, grading decisions, classroom management decisions. I sit and watch myself, with the good, adequate, and “oh no!” score cards waiting in my hand, as I make second to second decisions about what words and inflection to use with the student I’m speaking to. Oh, I want to do well. I want to do well so badly that I am hard on myself, because how else will I grow? I’m terrified I might end up complacent or even delusional about my own performance. So I come into school each day, saying, “Alright, do better, Alice,” without really knowing what I mean by that. Sometimes I wonder if the standards I ask myself to meet are possible, or even definable. But I never know, because that final test that would tell me never comes.

And if school is bad then summer is worse. It is formless and quiet. By choice I spend a lot of time by myself, left to my own devices. And there’s the rub. Alone, unshowered, on a July Tuesday morning, I sit on my bed, feeling a desperate pressure to accomplish something, without entirely understanding what I mean by that. I know that it is summer, and I am free. Free to do all the things I don’t normally make time for: cook and clean and read and write and walk and talk and put on make up and spend money. The list begins to grow and overwhelm me, the Mr. Knightley I have built out of extra shards of my own conscience says “Badly done!”, and I end up watching Netflix and indulging in a self-loathing which is nothing like rest.

I say all this not to sound dire, but because this is so often the gist of my inner monologue. I want to be told that I’m doing wonderfully, and by a more reliable source than myself, but I also want to be alone, and do things my own way.

So first I must laugh at myself, because that is usually a good way to begin (and beginnings are the best endings).

And second I must repent of more than a little self-aggrandizement. I must repent of the silly belief that even if I cannot be the savior of the world, I can still be the savior of myself. I must remind myself that goodness and growth and learning come not through human effort, but through God’s grace to us.

Last, I must find a new way through. I am not a good measurer of myself, so I must find something else to measure, some other structure to lean on, to tell me the value of the work I am doing. I must hold it up to the cross, I must ask it about joy, I must find if it leads me to worship.

Philosophers have measured mountains,

Fathom’d the depths of seas, of states, and kings,

Walk’d with a staff to heaven, and traced fountains

       But there are two vast, spacious things,

The which to measure it doth more behove:

Yet few there are that sound them; Sin and Love.

Christmas and Tradition

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When I was growing up, Christmas meant Grandma’s. It meant long hours in the car stuffed with puffy coats, reading Dickens’ Christmas Carol aloud stave by stave, and then arriving in Missouri to cousins and orange balls and running fast on carpet in sock feet. Christmas meant crowded rooms and couches and beds. It meant all twenty-some of us choosing a favorite carol in order from oldest to youngest while siblings switched off at the piano. It meant sitting hip-to-hip with contented joy. I was in awe of those Christmases, so in awe that they sometimes made me forget myself.

But I am grown now, and no Christmas will ever be the same. My grandparents have been gone for over a year and the house is sold. The place we went is no longer ours and the faces which used to await our arrival have been buried. The things which made me love Christmas so seem to have vanished. So it is tempting to me to spend the holiday mourning the traditions and the stability that are lost. This time of year, I want nothing more than to run back to the comforts of childhood or even adolescence, to revel in the reliable beauty of those Christmas customs.

But I cannot return to those traditions, so instead I will try to remember the self-forgetfulness that they taught me.  Because Christmas is not actually meant to be about tradition. It is meant to be about the world turned upside down, shook to its core. It is the story of a remote corner of a poor place where a child was born to speak truth, and to sweat blood, and to die, that I may know truth, and be clean, and live.

Every year that is true. The foundations of our little worlds may shudder, the walls which kept us safe and warm may crumble, the faces around us may seem strange and hard, but every year, if we look up, a star calls us to Bethlehem. We are meant to follow its light, to worship and be changed.

On Friday, I read How the Grinch Stole Christmas to my juniors for storytime. I laughed through some of it, but some lines moved me:

Every Who down in Whoville, the tall and the small,
Was singing! Without any presents at all!
He HADN’T stopped Christmas from coming! IT CAME!
Somehow or other, it came just the same!

I am grateful for the Child who has come to save, and I am thirsty for his grace.

Without a Place

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Last month, I read an essay by a woman named Jennifer Trafton, and in it she described “the feeling of being the Picassoesque face in every crowd…You would like me, surely, if only my left ear were not hanging crookedly off the end of my tongue.” The essay made me cry.

I was raised by parents who were academics and who were Christians. They had PhDs from the University of Chicago and now taught British literature at a state university, and every Sunday morning we brought along hymnals and sang “Fairest Lord Jesus” and “Holy, Holy, Holy” on the way to church in the minivan. In a world where the evangelical mind was a scandal, and universities were ever busier building ivory towers of Babel, they, and therefore we, were impossibilities. Yet there we sat after dinner each night, reading aloud everything from Corrie Ten Boom to Thackeray to Yeats to the Psalms.

And so I was always acutely aware I was like no one around me. From the time I was about six I understood that I was my own little untethered island, floating through the strange seas of the wide world. My friends listened to Adventures in Odyssey and went to the beach every summer and spring and watched the Disney Channel and had things like Gushers and individually packaged Pringles in their snacks. I read multiple books a day and swung on a swing my dad had made and took long walks when my mom kicked me out of the house for reading too much and ate home-grown dried tomatoes off the racks of my mother’s dehydrator. Through sticky North Carolina summers, we went without air conditioning and lived with windows open to the breeze, and in winter we heated our house with a wood stove. Once, while standing in my kitchen, a friend who had been to my house dozens of times told me that it seemed strange that my family owned something so modern and practical as a microwave.

I felt displaced. I was made of some other metal than all those around me, softer, with an odd sheen, and I knew the differences went far beyond my family. I remember as a child spending afternoons wandering round and round my backyard looking for a place that could be only mine, that felt just right. I climbed trees and I crawled under bushes and no place fit. I was the wrong shape for all of them. Later when I first began to write stories in earnest, I always stuck consciously to fairy tales. I felt so unsure of and baffled by the world around me, that I didn’t think I could muster it onto the page. I did not belong to it, and it did not belong to me.

I don’t think a day has gone by when I have not felt too small or too large, too old or too young, too much or too little. I was loved and am loved, and I have never once doubted that, but in every group, I feel like the token, though I’m never sure what I’m meant to be a token of–the one who reads and dreams and cries and digs her heels in? The one-of-these-things-is-not-like-the-other girl?

When I was young I resisted my differences: I wished my parents had named me Sarah, like everybody else, and when the other fifth grade girls chatted about their manicures and asked me if I was going to get one too, I said ‘maybe,’ knowing as I said it that it was a lie. But by the time I hit middle school, I had decided to make peace with my awkwardly glinting differences, to learn to love them. I began to cling to them, in fact, sometimes at the cost of relationships with other people. I was shy and stubborn and defensive. (I am still shy and stubborn and defensive, but sometimes I am a little better at hiding it.) I cowered beneath the banner of myself. In fact, there were seasons and places in my life when, for my own comfort, I consistently translated “I am different than you” into “I am better than you.” I thought that superiority would ward off loneliness and fear. (It didn’t. It just made me bitter.)

Around the time I was seventeen or eighteen, though, I gradually began to get a little better at friendship. I started to actually listen, and wait, and wade slowly through the waters of the people around me. And I found, over the course of months and years, that many people who to me had seemed as if they fit so well, were actually covering their own strangely shaped hearts with their hands, and covertly glancing at the world around them with incredulity. I began to carry a quietly blossoming sense of awe as I encountered others. I wasn’t the oddity. We all were.

I know now that the misfit feeling comes from different sources and is more tangible for some than others. For some it’s characterized by real, crushing sorrow or sin which has marked them like Cain, for others by differences in race or culture or ability or interest or by unhappy and broken families and relationships. For many of us though, it’s just a vague feeling that one is some complex and malfunctioning prototype abandoned in a warehouse full of unlike objects.

None of this seems joyful or purposeful and yet I remain awed. I’m not certain why. Perhaps it is because I know our loneliness has the potential to teach us compassion and kindness. Perhaps it is because I know we were not abandoned in the warehouse after all, and that God has a plan for all us billions of impossibilities. Or perhaps it is because I know that God came to seek and save the lost and call little Zacchaeus out of the tree where he clung. I am overwhelmed by the largeness and the strangeness of such original Love.

seated-woman-in-garden

Jesus’ Love

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I spend a lot of time thinking about Jesus’ love. I think about how much he loves my students, and how I need to love them like he does. I think about how often I fail to love them like he does, about how when I fail he remains faithful, faithful, faithful to them. But with all that thought, I forget that he loves me too. Jesus’ love is for me.

He does not care about my filthy-rags good works and good words. He loves the heart of the matter, the heart of me. He died for that heart. He died so that he could hold that heart in his hands and whisper inexorable love through the rot to its core.

Or sometimes he speaks louder than a whisper. In an entry from more than two years ago, during my senior year of college I wrote, “When I am silent, He shouts and it hurts. Those pipes and those bright figures in glass will not remain always still. The ‘great sloth heart’ is moving.” Last week was that kind of week, and oh, I thank God for it.

I MCed thesis presentations two nights last week. I was so nervous about it that I actually lost my appetite for about two days, but then one by one I stood face to face with eight students before they stepped on stage. They fiddled nervously with their printed speeches, and without asking I could tell that their mouths were dry and their palms were sweaty. I got to look them in the eye and tell them that in forty minutes, they would have done the impossible. And then I got to step up on stage with them, and, sometimes haltingly, pray before those assembled. And forty minutes later when we applauded, their shoulders would drop, they would take their first deep breath in two hours, and you could see in their eyes that the color had come back into the world, but brighter than ever before, because each had just slain a giant. I stood tall and proud and forgetful of my fear.

Also, on Thursday, two of my classes of juniors turned in an assignment to me in which they had to compare themselves to one of the foreign missionaries we studied. I asked them to answer honestly about their interests, their personalities, their characters, even their spiritual resources. I have only begun to grade them, but this is perhaps my favorite assignment I have ever given. I do not know if it has academic value, in fact, I doubt that it does, but almost every single child has sat quietly with his or her soul for at least a moment (a feat for some of them) and then, in some small way, laid it out on the page before me. I am moved by the shy willingness of many of them to look themselves in the eye.

Really, I think most teenagers want two things. They want to be seen. Even the quiet ones want to be seen, even the ones who push you away want to be seen and want to be known. They want to be seen and they want to be loved. To be loved is to be taken in and named and accepted. For some of them almost everything they do and say is based on these two deeply felt desires. I try my best to follow through when I see it in their eyes. And I often, often fail.

As we get older (and, of course, I am my only firsthand experience of getting older) we gain confidence and weight and complexity of thought, and those intense desires for recognition and love get pushed down and fed less. For most of us, this makes us easier to live with, both for ourselves and for others. But I also think it’s a shame. Because desires, like Wisdom on the street corner, call out loudly for fulfillment. And the fulfillment at the end of the road, the voice that always and forever seeks to answer those calls, is Jesus.

Because Jesus sees and knows, oh he knows all about it. And more than that, despite that, through that, because of that, he loves. He is Love, bleeding and victorious. Those things my students want? They can have them. They were made for those things, and so were you and I. Christ makes us clean and he takes us home. Rejoice.

Thursday’s Children

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This is going to be one of those entries where I sit down with my computer, get keyboard happy, and draw tenuous connections between lots of largely unrelated things. But that’s not so bad. It means I’ve been thinking lately.

I turn twenty-four on Sunday, and I’ve been remembering that old nursery rhyme I learned growing up about the day you’re born on.

Monday’s child is fair of face,

Tuesday’s child is full of grace,

Wednesday’s child is full of woe,

Thursday’s child has far to go,

Friday’s child is loving and giving,

Saturday’s child must work for a living,

But the child is born on the Sabbath day

Is bonny and blithe, good and gay.

If we’re getting technical, I’m supposed to be Friday’s child, loving and giving, but I seem to find myself continually in Thursday. I am never enough. Never strong enough, tough enough, brave enough, far enough. Always coming in three steps (or three miles) behind where all my “shoulds” tell me I ought to be. Of course, this has been a hard week at school, not terrible, but full and heavy, so I know I am not alone in this. As Leslie said on Tuesday, “All the news seems to be bad news.”

And last weekend I read Matthew 8, and I wondered. It tells the story of Jesus casting out a legion of demons into a herd of pigs. “And He said to them, ‘Go.’ So when they had come out, they went into the herd of swine. And suddenly the whole herd of swine ran violently down the steep place into the sea, and perished in the water.” When the people in the town hear what has happened, what lengths Christ has gone to to heal two possessed men, they come out to meet him en masse and beg him to leave them alone and never come back.

And I wondered, because I could see the people’s point. They are deeply unsettled by this man who speaks only one syllable, yet who looms over the whole story. He destroys their whole livelihood, sends it racing over a cliff, just to make clean the minds and souls of two outsiders living literally on the edge of death. I sat reading, Thursday’s worn child, asking why he would send away the things which support us, the things which get us closer to far enough. The herd of swine was the daily provision these people had for simply getting to the next step, keeping themselves from falling too far behind. Why let evil destroy it? I was annoyed.

But then, this past Saturday, I went to the funeral of a friend’s uncle who had died suddenly. He was a few months younger than my mom and this was very sad and a little bit frightening, but more than that, throughout the whole service, I was struck by joy. Every person who spoke, though grieved, seemed full of the joy that comes with knowing Jesus, joy that the man they loved was now in his presence. I had met him only once or twice, but found myself so moved by the whole proceeding and it was not until a day or two ago that I realized why.

I look around at all of us and think how far we have to go. The light is a long way down the path we walk, and we know that we are lagging and weak, and our hard-bought income has gone crashing into the sea.

But perhaps we should open our eyes, because he is here before us. Alive even on a Thursday.

The demons are cast out but we, we are not. We are brought in. Love himself died so that you would not have to lose heart on those endless roads of self-sanctification. So turn home to the hands that made you and you will find a good, good Father running to meet you. In the light of his day, you will not care about the pigs.

Heavenly feet pound the earth,

Stones and soil shake,

The mud on my eyes cracks and crumbles,

The shape of you grows,

And fire wraps round your shoulders like love.

The Sun

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I’m writing because it’s March 31st, I haven’t written since February, and I don’t think I’ve ever missed a month. I don’t have much to say, though. It’s spring break, I just got back from a college visit with my brother, and all I can think of is how many things there are to do before I go back to school on Monday. It’s actually not that long of a list, but my foul mood is managing to expand the font size.

But on our early flight back from Houston this morning I watched the sun rise. A blade of orange light bisected the darkness. Above it, the clouds made mountains and then gold faded into the softest blue. That blue got bigger and brighter and bigger and warmer until, quite suddenly, the clear, white sun came up. Even when I closed my eyes it burned through my eyelids and lit the world.

It’s March 31st and I watched the sun rise.

A Servant of God in the Winter and the Springtime

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It’s spring here today!

This blog has changed substantially since I graduated from college almost two years ago. A week or so ago, I found myself reading back over old entries from early 2014, when I was racing through drafts of my novel and watching the world turn to spring at my feet faster than I knew it ever could. That girl poured her soul out onto the page fast and thick, in words full of inexhaustible hope.

I don’t do that anymore. Certainly, my circumstances are different now, but so is the soul I have to pour. I will do my best today, though. I will do my best.

There was some lie that I believed way back when, that teaching would feel like a success story. It does not. It feels small and long. On bad days it feels like trudging through the mud in a narrow lane. On good days it feels like removing your own internal organs, and passing them into eager, outstretched hands. I have a Wendell Berry poem by my desk which ends with that: “Every day you have less reason not to give yourself away.”

This has been a somewhat hard year for me personally. Last semester I spent quite a lot of time dreaming about what it would look like to write, just write, and have all day long with words and silence and clouds of story. At the root of that, I think, was a very private understanding with myself that my talents were not being used properly, that this job could not really be what God meant for me. Surely there had been a mistake. I was not supposed to end up like Zerubbabel, merely a name in the line of begats. I was the kind made to stand on her own.

But, of course, there is no such kind. We all have feet of clay. And with aches and pains, I have learned a good deal in the last month. February is a poignant and exacting teacher. Through a series of little failures and humiliations, grit that got under my nails and bile I had to swallow, I have come to remember: “God has chosen the foolish things of the world to put to shame the wise.” And now I am sitting hesitantly at the golden feet of my Lord and he is saying to me the same words he spoke over a cowering Moses: “You shall serve God on this mountain.”

That he should say this to me, when I finally deign to listen, is not what surprises me. I half-expected it all along. What surprises me is that he is a different God than I thought. My talents are not wasted in teaching, because a God like this does not want to use my talents. He wants to use my weakness (which there is plenty of). He is a God who may turn my hand leprous to show what he can do. I always say that he loves my students more than I do: well, I must let him.

And just because teaching doesn’t feel like some success story on a day-to-day basis, doesn’t mean it isn’t one. If I am willing, I can be a participant in the victory of the risen Christ. “You shall serve God” is not merely an order, but a promise. A promise that the words I speak in weariness and the lessons I teach three times over will take root, in his good time. I am small. And that is good. He has made me weak, that I may take shelter in his eternal strength.

“Lead me safely on to the eternal kingdom, not asking whether the road be rough or smooth.”

A Different Kind of Studenthood

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This may take a while to write, but as I’m beginning, I’m sitting in a room full of freshmen who are writing an in-class essay. There’s a hum of heavy breathing and pencils on paper and turning of pages as they refer to notes in their books. It seems both familiar and distant.

I have been teaching for a year and a half and still it still catches me unawares sometimes that I’m no longer a student. That I’m no longer passing papers down the row, or digging my binder out of my backpack, or throwing caution to the north wind when an essay prompt is set in front of me. The sun is not slanting through the window in the back corner and warming my back, like it is for the kid who sits by the wall. I am up front driving and pulling and pushing. Sometimes my shoulders hurt at the end of the day from the weight of it.

In the moments when it does get calm, though, calm in the midst of the hourly storm, sometimes I remember myself in high school. I liked it. I was a good kid. I cried a lot but I was happy. I was generally sweet and smart. The best things I did were read and write. Also once I gave twenty dollars to a friend just because she needed it. That was the highlight of my good-doing.

I was sensitive. I used to take in every little thing, feel every motion around me, bend with all my weight. I remember laughing and screaming and crying. I remember really, really caring that people saw me laugh. (I did not care if they saw me cry.) Funny. All of my memories are so loud, even though most of the people I went to high school with probably remember me as quiet.

For the past week or so, I have been feeling stabs of envy toward my students. I wish I was still free to ride the waves of my feelings, wallow in my stinging misery, let wild, self-conscious joy overtake me. When I was a teenager, I was very certain the world was mine. It felt lived in. On selfish days, on narrow days, I look at those loud kids I love, and I want the world back.

This is ludicrous, of course. I have re-written this paragraph five or six times in an attempt to tell you why. I have tried to lead into it several ways, but now I will just give up and tell you. God is bigger now than he was back then. Not always closer or easier or clearer, in fact, sometimes just the opposite, but larger and greater and stronger and more, oh yes. How could I ever return to a diminutive God?

That is not all. I “see the choices a bit more clearly.” When I was sixteen and seventeen, I was only just beginning to believe that failure existed. Now I am at what seems to be the designated age for coming to terms with failure. As is, I think, usual, I am finding failures in myself in droves and having to decide each by each, with every failure that rises out of my gut, whether I will fight it or kneel to it. These are the options. Or they would be the options if I served a God who would fit in my pocket.

But because I do not, there is grace. Because I do not, I may give my failures away. Acknowledge them as my bastard offspring and offer them up for destruction to a God who is very large and getting larger by the second. A God who will break me and change me and shape me as the sun warms the back of the tired, nervous kid who sits by the wall.