Author: admin

Posted on

Playing Injured

But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. – II Cor. 12:9

When I watch sporting events and the announcers tell me that so-and-so is questionable because of a sore hamstring or right bicep, I expect the person to perform well regardless. It’s not a fair expectation, but I have it anyway. I think it’s because I have never had never had those particular injuries, I can’t immediately put myself into the position of imagining what playing the sport while nursing those injuries feels like.

Here’s what I do know about: sore throats. Over the past two weeks, I’ve had what amounts to a canker sore on my epiglottis. My entire mouth hurts any time that I swallow. This consequently makes simple and important tasks like eating and sleeping and talking painful.

This is a comparatively small thing. I wonder if I had this ailment for a month, I would adjust and the pain would start to become cognitively dull for me. It doesn’t feel that way today.

What I do know is that it makes teaching hard. I feel like I’m playing injured. I have not told my students about my ailment, but I wonder if my demeanor is different or if they have same faulty expectations of me that I do of athletes: “Hey, if he’s up there teaching, he must be at full strength.”

I realize how often I’m guilty of assuming things just by examining students’ demeanors. They’re in class so they must be at full strength. Their waning attention is a moral or intellectual lapse, not a result of the physical or emotional toll outside circumstances have taken on them.

My sore throat has made me thankful. I take smaller bites of food and end up savoring it more. I choose my words sparingly and end up listening more.

It also makes me think about all the things I consider my strengths. If God’s strength is made perfect in weakness and I’m waiting for my own perfection to perform well, I’m elevating my own strengths above God’s. I don’t want to play hurt and because of that, I can’t see the ways I play hurt even when I think I’m fine. A sore throat is better than the millstone of pride, and I pray that emerge from this ailment healthier and humbler.

 

Posted on

Sustainability

On a moment to moment basis, a large portion of my mental bandwidth is spent worrying about the present moment being repeated into the future ad infinitum or figuring out how to replicate the present moment forever.

Examples range from my daughter’s coughing (will she ever stop?), to some new reading method (how do I apply this to every book I own?), or some classroom exercise that works (how do I do this all the time?) to a good day with my wife (can’t we do this all the time?).

These feelings are often distortions of a very real prayer: “Let your kingdom come, let your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

My desire for positive sustainability is a yearning for eternity here on earth. I must say, a lot of times I’m glad God doesn’t give me what I want.

God has dealt with me a lot this year about my tendency for longing for the past, either in regret over what I failed to do or in longing to do again what I used to do. When I carry that tendency into the present, it’s like I’m in perpetual state of melancholy.

The reality is that this is always happening:  “Therefore [Christ] is able to save completely those who come to God through him, because he always lives to intercede for them.” (Hebrews 7:25)

I pray for a child’s faith to rejoice in that reality to know that because of Christ my Father gives bread and not stones. Because of Christ, I can live in true thankfulness: for when my daughter does stop coughing, for when I have a reading experience that proves fruitful, for when something I do in the classroom helps my students, and when I have a great day with my wife.

Posted on

#3Gratitudes

Every class this semester, I’ve handed my students a daily worksheet with a space to write down three gratitudes.

Then, we’ve actually started each class by closing our eyes and focusing on the gratitudes as a way to attune our hearts to God’s goodness.

It’s been personally beneficial and has offered a segue into prayer before every class. More than that, it’s helped focus me for the fifty or seventy-five minutes I have with my students.

At times this semester, I wonder whether it’s benefiting my students.

This morning, I received this email from a student in my comp class.

I…ran across this [article link] on the internet. I thought it was so cool since we do gratitudes every morning in your class which has become a habit for me personally. Now one of the most successful women in the world is doing daily gratitudes like we do here at SWU in Central, SC…
So Cool!

Yes, it is. Needless to say, it made my day before my day even began.

God is incredibly good and certainly worthy of me giving thanks.

 

Posted on

The Long Game and Reading

In the summer of 2017, I finished reading Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose, a book I had started back in March of that same year because a friend was writing about it.

I stalled out about 300 pages in once April hit, but in a rarity for me, I picked it back up at the beginning of July and sped through the last 200 pages.

I had been holding onto the novel for nearly twenty years.

Dr. Thayle Anderson assigned the novel to our American Novels class when I was sophomore, but I blew it off. However, I kept the novel despite having never read it, because my first serious girlfriend was in Dr. Anderson’s class with me and introduced herself to me under the auspices of talking about the novel, which she loved. Side note: I probably should have known the relationship was doomed when I didn’t even read the book.

As I finally began reading it nearly two decades after first receiving it, I thought it well-written, but underwhelming. All it took was an April crush, and I put it down.

But when I returned to it in July, I felt as if my eyes had been opened. I realized that it was about marriage and the tension of individual flourishing in the context of said marriage. The heroine, a 19th Century American woman, is constantly having to move for her husband’s career though she was every bit the artist/professional he was. The novel poignantly explores the shame and guilt that comes with trying to love your spouse when you don’t have any spiritual foundation for things like grace or forgiveness.

To have read this in the summer of 2017, the summer where my wife took a new gig and moved 3.5 hours away with our daughter, absolutely devastated me.

It made me realize that:

1) I was no more ready to read that book at 19 than I was when I was 10. It would have been lost on me.

2) I wasn’t even ready to read the book two months before.

3) Only through the peculiar circumstances I found myself in now with Britt was the book able to speak to me.

This is the kind of experience that I hold onto as a teacher: the possibility that something I assign may not matter for a student in the moment but may come back to them fifteen years later.

My friend and I call it the long game, and I want God-given patience to continue playing it as an educator and disciple.

 

Posted on

Grateful for Voices

As the semester progressed, I started modeling more and more of the work I asked my students to do. It was fine to write rough drafts because then I could model revision. The tough part was writing a purposefully rough opening draft, and even more specifically, failing in that draft in a way that would help highlight typical student errors. My voice was always off. I seemingly cannot write like anyone but myself.

Today, I had the opportunity to revisit the essays of some students I taught in the spring. I was struck by how good one of them was, so struck in fact that I reached out to the student to say thank you. Not only were the insights unique, but they were expressed in a way that was totally unlike mine. I was encountering a student who had already developed her voice. Her critical acumen was still growing, but she had figured out how to write things effectively. The fact that she had something to say made the essay all the more a delight.

I’m so thankful for moments like this where I confront in my own students’ work the kind of reading and writing that I certainly could not imitate. I can only sound like me, which is a good thing and bad thing. It’s most often a bad thing when it becomes clear that I’m writing for an audience other than my students, the ostensible beneficiaries of the model. I don’t want students to produce essays I could write. I want them to write better, more diverse essays. This particular student nailed it.

I pray for the wisdom to hear student voices and the willingness to highlight and share them. When I am listening, they are indeed a beauty to hear.

Posted on

Going Back

But Jesus said to him, “No one, after putting his hand to the plow and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.” – Luke 9:62

I read this verse today in an article on education, and it cut me to the quick. This blog is one place where I have put my hand to the plow. I need God’s grace to not look back.

Posted on

38 Now as they were traveling along, He entered a village; and a woman named Martha welcomed Him into her home. 39 She had a sister called Mary, who was seated at the Lord’s feet, listening to His word. 40 But Martha was distracted with [a]all her preparations; and she came up to Him and said, “Lord, do You not care that my sister has left me to do all the serving alone? Then tell her to help me.”41 But the Lord answered and said to her, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and bothered about so many things; 42 but only one thing is necessary, for Mary has chosen the good part, which shall not be taken away from her.”  (Luke 10:38-42 NASB)

I am a Martha.

Let me put a finer point on it.

I am a Steven Covey reading, Zig Ziglar listening, Tony Robbins Personal Power II owning Martha.

Goals? Responsibilities? Affirmations? Identified. Discerned. Verbalized.

In the words of the lay philosopher Larry the Cable Guy, git-r-dun.

So this passage from Luke is a convicting one. Continue reading “”

Posted on

Teaching and Power

Job 36:22 “God is exalted in his power. Who is a teacher like him?”

This passage makes me uncomfortable, mainly because it connects power and teaching. The two sentences form a causal relationship. Because God is exalted, Elihu appears to say, who is a teacher like him?

The answer is no one. In his absolute power, God confronts us with our powerlessness and offers to teach us contingent on our fear and awe.

It jars against the image we have of Christ in John 13 washing the disciples feet, telling them they are right to call him rabbi and to do as he has done: serve their students.

The Job verse makes me uncomfortable because I don’t want to think through the kind of power that I have at my disposal: be responsible for the factor I play in a student’s educational future or the duty I have to God to make sure that what I’m teaching glorifies him.

The power God has is not an end in itself. He does not teach in order to exert power. He uses that power in order to teach, love, and serve. In the same way, Christ lowers himself not as a way of making himself less the Son of God but as a way to show us that his power is a means to an end: communion with us through service.

I pray that I will use the power God has given me to better serve my students: neither denying or remaining unconscious of that power nor using it as an end. It is by following Christ’s example that I can best merge education and discipleship.

Posted on

Asking Questions

Job 31: 15 “Did not he who made me in the womb make them? Did not the same one form us both within our mothers?”

I like to ask questions. The problem is that, more times than I’d like to admit, I ask questions because I don’t want to accept an answer rather than out of a desire to know the answer.

The book of Job is filled with questions and, in fact, culminates with the questions God asks Job.

Job knows the answer to these two questions he asks about his accusers.

Yes.

Most definitely.

God made Job, and God made his accusers.

That is, Job and his accusers are alike at the deepest level.

Job brings up the womb quite pointedly. For the past several chapters, he’s heard his “friends” declare what’s been wrong with Job’s life post-birth. Their categories have been simple: righteous and unrighteous. Since God only punishes the unrighteous, Job’s current predicament indicates his sinfulness.

But these categories are examples of what Alan Jacobs calls “lumping” in his book How to Think. Lumping is an important cognitive exercise where we group data into existing categories, but precisely because those categories are old standbys, they tend to get trotted out as a way to avoid reflection.

Job’s category—a single one that includes both him and his accusers and everyone else—is made up of people God created. This is what Alan Jacobs calls splitting, an example where Job has categorized data by a new set of categories. In this sense, he’s “splitting” even though he trots out one less category than his friends.

This push and pull between familiar and unfamiliar categories is old hat for me, and I’ve been feeling it a lot lately: namely, the need to evaluate more, to lean into difficult questions and underlying tensions with my faith and my relationships even while trying to practice a kind of patience that allows these tensions to exist without me trying to fix them right away.

Keeping that balance on my own is impossible. It requires the Spirit.

What’s particularly difficult about this balance is that this tension is never lived out in a vacuum. It’s not an experiment in some laboratory. I can see my own inner turmoil play itself out in my family life or inside my classroom.

Am I separate or part of the community? Am I trying to reach an agreement and find commonality or is it my job to divide and separate? Am I to apply existing categories to new data or do my best to find new categories to apply to old data?

As a disciple and educator, these are questions I will be asking the rest of my life.

Unlike Job’s questions, I don’t know the answer.

Like Job, I know the one who does.