Scenes from School: Boys and Pictures

Today I took pictures of some of our kids who didn't have pictures on file yet.

I started out with the elementary school boys. At that age, even if they're in for anger management problems, they hear the teacher tell them to go stand in the hall and smile and they do. One boy smiled with such a surprising flash of brilliance I'm surprised my retinas are intact.

The teenage boys aren't so eager to have their smiles preserved for posterity. They're trying to save face, to be tough. "I don't smile for cameras" I hear, over and over again, and I heckle them about it and most of them give a little. Some break into laughter and hide their faces in their hands. "Wait, wait! Don't take it yet, don't take it yet!"

Maybe while they've been here they've knocked over chairs and started fistfights and threatened teachers, and maybe if they'd been a few years older when they did whatever landed them here they'd be in prison, and maybe they're still on the way there. Picture day reminds me of the hungry hearts beneath the bluster and bravado.

"The young lions do lack and suffer hunger;

But they who seek the LORD shall not be in want of any good thing."

-- Psalm 34:10

"Seek the LORD while He may be found;

Call upon Him while He is near."

--Isaiah 55:6

"The LORD is near to all who call upon Him,

To all who call upon Him in truth."

--Psalm 145:18

Pray for my boys, and pray for lionhearted men to walk beside them and teach them how and Whom to seek.

Positive Self-Talk

It's been a long time coming.

Living in the same house

we turned strangers,

me not knowing what was in his head,

him not caring what was in mine.

We moved from holding each other

to holding each other back,

and I didn't like who I saw

in the mirror every morning,

settling for a life more ordinary.

So I packed a pipe with

gunpowder and nails and

lobbed it into his car window as

he drove onto our street, which was

messy, of course, and who likes messy,

but free, too, so much more free.

It's for the best.

It's a shame the kids were riding with him

but there's a lot of socially well-adjusted people

who've grown up blind in one eye, and surely it's

better this way than living with tension so thick

you could cut it with a butcher knife, which

can't be good for anybody.

Most of the nails are out of the street already,

nice because I'd hate to pop a tire

on top of everything else,

like washing my carpet because for the fifteenth time

a visitor showed up with bloody feet and

I let people keep their shoes on now.

God will get me through this.

Scenes from School: Some of the Girls

1.

She came in one day all bright clothes and big eyes and chatter. A door down the hall was closed and she wanted somebody to talk to, somebody not one of the other girls waiting for the class transition. I barely had time for a word in, and when she left I felt as though I'd just had an encounter with a butterfly turned human.

In the few weeks remaining before she left she came by several times, after that. All she needed was an open door.

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2.

She comes by almost every day at least once, not to talk to me but to look in the mirror that hangs outside my office. It's one of those convex mirrors like the ones you see in drug stores, and I like it because I can glance out the door and see who's rustling around in the storage room. She uses it to check herself out.

I wonder what she sees, looking in that distorted reflection. What I see is someone who's always stylish, trendy yet classy at the same time (none of the plunging necklines or tight shirts designed to distract). There are looks of concentration, sometimes smiles as she turns back to her friends. When she moves on, I'll miss her visits to the mirror.

I wonder why I've never told her.

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3.

I'm in administration and I know their names even if I've never seen their faces. I know hers when I see it on the poem she submitted for the art contest. It begins in a deceptively simple style and grows in complexity, and it has a twist that grabs at me, and I read it again and decide I will ask her social worker to ask her if she'd give me a copy.

She doesn't know me. Or herself, judging from what she's written, but that's all right. She's only thirteen. I was twenty when I put the same sentiment to paper.

May the God whose purpose she invokes in her poem show her who she is, more and more, every day. As He is doing with me.

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Pray for my girls.

Suzanne in the Auditor's Den

Today was another audit day. This morning I came in to find that the documents I requested far too late to be reasonably expected before the auditors arrived had come, after all. The teacher who called in sick today had corrected her attendance binder before she left last night. All was well.

After a phone call from up front warning me that everything was going horribly and that the auditors were picking on little tiny things that they hadn't ever told us about before, the serene feeling wasn't so strong. After the second phone call, it occurred to me that I hadn't really prayed much about this audit. I'd been feeling so much calmer and more confident and prepared and I'd not been praying. That was it. That was why the whole audit was failing. I hadn't prayed, I hadn't been asking other people to pray, and now I was taking the whole school down with me.

"Do you hear yourself?" another voice in my head spoke up. "What is this, an equation? 'God's favor = Perfect sacrifice of Jesus Christ + Number of prayers Suzanne throws up / 2'? You do realize what part of that is unnecessary, right? Everything after Christ."

In long-ago Babylon, three men of God were called before an angry ruler and given a simple choice: worship him or burn to death. Their response, recorded in Daniel 3, is one of my favorite testimonies in all of Scripture, and the words in bold are my favorite part of it: "O Nebuchadnezzar, we do not need to give you an answer concerning this matter. If it be so, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the furnace of blazing fire; and He will deliver us out of your hand, O king. But even if He does not, let it be known to you, O king, that we are not going to serve your gods or to worship the golden image that you have set up."

When the auditors came to my building office after nearly three hours with the community program, they were smiling and laughing. I was remembering what I've heard about them, about how they're out to get us and make our lives difficult, and remembering what I've heard about all of us, that we are all sinners in need of grace and that once God has granted it there is no audit, from a school district review of our paperwork to the devil's review of our daily lives, that can ever take that grace away.

The auditors found we'd changed a section of schedule in the middle of the year. For about twelve kids. Which is not allowed. I saw us losing the funding on all of these kids in a single swoop, but instead of pressing the point they gave us a chance to make up for it. And when they left, less than an hour after they arrived, they were thanking us for our help and congratulating us on being so well prepared.

I know I was well-organized, and I know that to the auditors (all either at or approaching retirement age) I likely have the granddaughter aura, and I know that when it comes down to it, neither of those are the primary reason why the audit went well. God delivered me from the wrath of the auditors.

But even if He had not, God would still have been God.

I went out with joy and was led forth in peace.

The Highest Calling

Quite recently I read of the struggle of a sister in Christ who has been wrestling with the idea that she has to work outside the home to be a fulfilled person. She has a young daughter and a new child on the way, her husband is gainfully employed so that from an economic perspective she doesn't have to work, and she thoroughly enjoys all the mothering tasks that are hers now and anticipates those to come, but there are people in her life who have been questioning her growing desire to stay home with her children instead of finishing her education and becoming an R.N. She wrote eloquently of the emerging realization that as long as she is following Christ with her whole heart, no one can stand in condemnation of her career choices.

Another sister in Christ wrote this in comment: "Motherhood is a woman's highest calling." While I appreciate this woman's supportiveness and her assertion that there is nothing wrong with staying home to raise the kids God gave you and that you shouldn't let the world tell you what to do about it...well.... Can we please retire that phrase?

I'm good with kids. Through nature and nurture and the gifts of God in each, I enjoy interacting with small people, especially one-on-one. And I thoroughly support mothers staying home with their children where it is possible. It's how I was raised, and I'm grateful to my mother for it. It's how many of my friends have raised or are raising their kids, with or without taking on additional jobs for the love of the work. So it's not that I think motherhood is a lesser calling than being a nurse or anything else.

But what about those of us who don't have children? What about those who not only don't have children because they are infertile or currently unable to adopt, but those who are unmarried and don't want to raise a child alone? What about those who have had miscarriages, or have lost a child after birth? Are we all missing out on the highest calling? Would God really create a highest calling for women and then bar some of us from it?

No. He wouldn't. He doesn't.

The highest calling is not to a position, but from a person. "Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy and my burden is light." (Matthew 11:28-29)

It's for women with children and without children. For women and for men. For everyone.

Walk towards the person of Jesus Christ and you can be certain that you are on the right path, wherever life takes you. Because it isn't really life that's taking you, bleak and impersonal. It's God. The God who says, "I, the Lord, have called you in righteousness; I will take hold of your hand." "I will lead the blind by ways they have not known, along unfamiliar paths I will guide them; I will turn the darkness into light before them and make the rough places smooth. These are the things I will do; I will not forsake them." (Isaiah 42:6a, 16)

May we follow You with willing and undivided hearts wherever you lead, O Lord.