Prosaic Mosaic

Spring is the time of year when I am humbled as a teacher.  Also just as a person, but it goes to teaching first.  I feel it keenly every year, and now I just expect it.  I am tired.   I am being simplistic.  I am streamlining things.  I am thinking about priorities, and not trying to control too much.  But there is still a lot to do.

There are a lot of things I could write right about now which would, what, somehow prove that I'm busy and really feeling it...?  But I don't want to.  Half of me says I chose teaching, so own it.  Another half says that you don't do this to people unless they're your people.  (And they've already been hearing from me this week.)   Meanwhile, I am doing my best. 

Every year though I discover again in this feeling of ratty humanity that God is artful in how He designed us.  We're wretched and vile and don't have very many manners and sometimes we're just tired.  A few weeks ago I heard the term 'human sandpaper' and it rang in my ears.  It has not left.  Even the students, when they hear a loud noise now, comment on it.   People have short fuses.  In this, I realized that it makes us still, thank you God, long for and hope for something beyond ourselves.  How relieving that it is not just about us.  

 

Last week, at the end of such a long day, Leigh and I sat at our desks, and I (including myself so much in this sentiment) spoke 'Humans kind of suck sometimes' into the silence.  And then we both started laughing.  Is that ok to say?  I think it is.   It felt really good to say, because I meant it about everything. 

That's what launched me to think again about the truest story of my life. 

I think that story is called redemption and Jesus, and we see parts of this story in ways that are so easy to miss, unless we are looking for it.  Let me tell you, I'm not out of the woods here yet.  As I type this, I am feeling like the most 'as is' human in the room, broken from all sides.  And then I stop typing and breathe and these words fill my mind.   

Most often lately I picture God saying to his worn little people, 'Look up!  Look up!'  When I've been so tired lately, I've gotten very literal and worried about the look of my physical space.   Literal about tasks, about control....like how I haven't really scrubbed my floors lately, not to my standards, not to my liking.  (Lame.  That's an awfully accusing first voice.  And it doesn't really sound like me at all.) 

  

(Look up!) 

I can put the high standards away when I look up.  I can say, 'This is my reality' to my best friends and find a bond I didn't expect.  I can see then that God makes you practice things that aren't completely comfortable for a thousand good reasons.  And usually being human means sorting out things like emotions and plans and the shape of your life at the teacher's desk. 

So my desk becomes a good place for real, honest prayer.  To breathe and laugh and eat lunch with my small tribe of teachers around here.  It's strong enough to support my bent shoulders when I need a break and put my head on its flat surface at the end of a long day.  It's practicality and empathy and space.  



Today, tired and gloriously ruined and yet ok, it also means raw prayers and the feeling of being reformed for bigger tasks.  There's a lot of trust in that feeling because last I checked, I didn't ask God to wreck me that bad to make me closer to Him.  But, wait, I did.  God's just not doing things the way I thought He would.  I sit next to the quotes below, all day every day at school, for a very good reason.  All I have to do is read them, blink and be still, breathe and pray and recalibrate.  (This helps said ratty humanity.)

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'God always gives you what you would have asked for if you knew everything that He knows.' - Tim Keller

'One day I would like to teach a few people many wonderful and beautiful things that will help them when they will one day teach a few people.'

'May we be consumed with the Creator of all things rather than with things created.'

'The ragamuffin who sees his life as a voyage of discovery and runs the risk of failure has a better feel for faithfulness than the timid man who hides behind the law and never finds out who he is at all.' - Brennan Manning

'My deepest awareness of myself is that I am deeply loved by Jesus Christ and I have done nothing to earn or deserve it.' - Brennan Manning

'If our identity is in our work, rather than Christ, success will go to our heads, and failure will go to our hearts.' - Tim Keller
'Courage, dear heart.' - C.S. Lewis

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 Aren't those beautiful things?  In this season of my life, that's where I want my heart to be.

Full circle, there is gratitude.  I have a lovely life.  One filled with interesting people and kind words and true things that fill me up when I don't expect it.  It's nice to see kids grow up.  It's nice to look out at clouds and changing weather.  It's good for me to have a social life in a city and a work life near farms.  It's good to have a challenge. 

It's even nice (I realize eventually) to be in a time when I am feeling so humbled again.  You don't want to go too far away from that, from your real emotional pulse, from the things you care about.  Sometimes you can't see that for a while until you cry about it. 

Sometimes life doesn't fit together perfectly at all. 
It takes some time. 
And sometimes that's really ok.