Pausing to Look

Inspiration this week?  For me, a list like this....

• Psalm 107 - God is in all places and reaches out to meet the needs of His people
• Starry Night by Van Gogh above my desk at school
• Blue Nalgene bottles and cool water which is helping to fight away the sickness that is creeping into my voice as I teach
• This
• Also this

Plain and Simple

I think that sometimes life is just really simple, and we make it complex.

How's that for a loaded statement?  It's nothing new or original, but I want to write about it today because I tend to need the reminder.  I am guilty of complexity, when all that is necessary is a breath, a prayer, a smile.  I've been trying to step out of this complexity for a while now because so much of the world is the business of busy, looking busy, staying busy.  I feel really tired of that look on people I know and love.  I also don't like it on me. 

I've got a problem with the word 'busy' and try not to use it, but two weeks ago before Spring Break, I saw a look in my eyes, and it belied the conversation.  

So enters the discussion called 'What I Am Learning in This Season of My Life'.   

Roads and Trips

I'm going on a road trip soon, and I'm so ready for it. Do you know road trips are one of my favorite things?  I feel like the Midwestern variety of people in this country are really good at these things, because they're necessary in order to go anywhere cool. 


One time, a (nameless) family member told me they hated road trips.  ('What do you do anyway?  Just sit there?')  It felt fundamentally wrong to hear this, and I have never forgotten it.  No, you don't just sit there.  You gaze at the horizon and see everything all at once.  

Me? Human? Yes.

Do you know this movie?  Don't mind the (appropriately labeled) calendar.  This moment in the movie was life today for me.

One thing that is interesting (read: annoying) to me about my life is that, sometimes, when things aren't ok, I'm the last one to admit it.  It's been a few days now, and I am trying to remind myself again and again that, like everyone else on the planet, sometimes I am just that human.  My spirit will become low, my health will fail me, my mind will become scattered and cloudy.  

That.  I am feeling that.   And I hear the arrogance behind it.
 
Moi?  Sick?  (Sure, sometimes.) 
Scattered?  In need of sleep?  In need of a good cry?  (Probably.) 
Needing a break?  (Yes, definitely.) 

What The Author Wrote For My Day

Today.
Some silence.
Drive time.
Cityscape gazing.
Hip hop.
Worship. 
Thoughts of lost sheep and Zephaniah 3:17.
My pastor doesn't avoid the beautiful reckoning moments of the Gospel.  He reminds me each week of God's character. 'Praise be to God, this is what he is like'  = a balm to my very soul.
Friendship.
Thoughts of Home.
Sunday dinner with kindred spirits and cousins.
Peace and sunny windows. 
Tea...green, cream with honey.

Retrospect

Yesterday I got to school and took down the snowflakes.  It was just the right time.  

We hang snowflakes every year, a hundred of them at least, from the ceiling and some in the windows too.  It is a tradition, something I fell into in Year 1.  Ah, Year 1 of the teaching life.  Snowflake Day 2008 emerged from a desperate attempt to fill time before Christmas Break.  Now, it's a 'thing'. 

I get nostalgic and sentimental about Snowflake Day because this is when all of my students, not just the loud ones, show me in class who they really are.  I'm up on the ladder and there's Christmas music blaring and it's loud and crazy and wonderful.  It's ordered chaos.  I love that time, I'm waiting for it, because they live so tightly in the fall at school.  At least some do.  They're worried about getting to class at the right second and where they will sit for lunch (legitimate) and what I will think of them.  It's nestled into the year at the point when we're happy to have snow, late  in slate gray November, 4 weeks before Christmas.  

Then, in the season we're in now, they come down, and I see again just how much real, authentic growth happens in these people every year. And in me. In the dead of winter, under the snowflakes. 

Counting Down

The story of today is that everyone I teach is taking a test.  Or a quiz.  Some are nervous, others going with the flow, hoping down the hours to Spring Break, which starts at the end of tomorrow.  In between us are the bells and the busses and the locker clean out (someone spilled juice, and the hall has begun to smell), and finishing those last tests and doing those concerts and then....a break.  We are all ready. 


Yesterday I went to a restaurant and everything I ordered was out of order.  I didn't even notice, but everyone else at the table did.  Basic conversation was difficult?  Yes.  My mind is slipshod, scattered, all over.  That's because all of the week before a test is review review review, and who is prompting them with a thousand questions?  Me.  Every hour, so many people, so much history.  So many thousands of conversations about history.  

Stories of Stories

Something is happening lately in my life that is making stories all around me seem bigger than ever.  'I have always felt that life is a story...'....yes, I love that line.  But now, it's more.  More about God and His work, more about the world seen from many angles.  Less about my own part of it. 

This story is worth telling.  

Tiny Sentence, Fierce and Loving

This comes from a brilliant little moment in a C.S. Lewis book.  (Do you know it?)  I've got this tiny sentence on my desk at school this year, and I need it so badly because it encourages the life I want to live.  I like it because it's simple. 

And simple things are favorite things.


I think that whether or not people like to admit it, this courage is what everyone needs.   More often than anything else, the strength that follows 'Courage, dear heart' is the answer to what they are praying for.  It calms what rattles, and it comes from Jesus, who is so good.  I cannot say enough about the goodness of Jesus to me, and how often in the last few weeks and months I have felt that in the core again of who I really am. 

The Quintessential Talk of the Teacher in March

No more talk of winter.  I now turn my heart towards spring. 

I woke up today to a series of e-mails from best kindred hearts, and they all said the same thing.  Take a trip.  Take a breath.  Go away for a while.  I'm taking that advice, and listening to these friends, mostly because I've been living in molasses.  Not a difficult thing considering said previously overly discussed weather and the teaching life in February. 

I've avoided talk of it here, but it will be said once.  February is the lowest of the low in the cycle of teaching.  It doesn't translate to everyone else who has a job in February and feels the same way, but in our world, in this cycle of knowing kids, working with them, encouraging them, and sometimes just surviving amidst them,  this is where it's toughest.

Yesterday at lunch my friends and I talked about waking up again, and how you come alive in a different ways in different seasons.  (Such a needed conversation.)  I got out of Dodge a few years ago in March, and of course it was perfect.  I went to Connecticut, which is where my friends lived with their new baby.  I took a plane ride by myself and got caught up in interesting conversations with strangers.  I drove along roads that ran parallel to the sea.  I ate seafood and thought colonial things.  But mostly, I breathed. 

Ice

Last weekend I was walking down the sidewalk, and a distinct thought came to mind.   'I am now a person who lives my life on the ice.' 

This is Minnesota.  The ice is still with us, a part of a cycle that we all know so well.  School is cancelled.  The salt doesn't work.  The temps are hovering around 0.  You can't see buildings from the road so you have to guess at the right turn when you're looking for some new place.  I am doing my very best to keep a good perspective going here.  Forever is just a feeling.  Soon it will be spring and then summer.    Life sails by, right?  Lots of this feels relative, right?  Right.