A Story...

            My friend is a teacher and she told me her story.

Many of her students are from poverty; not abject poverty, but enough to cause stress which no child should have to know, but unfortunately many do. Add that to the fact that they are middle-schoolers, an already tough age, and these creatures can be nasty, cruel, malicious, and blatantly confrontational. They have so much swirling and crashing around in their minds and in their hearts that they do not know how to process new emotions and deal with them constructively.

Thus ignorant and innocent, they lash out at any and everyone. Usually, this means her. She loves her students, but there are many days, provoked by many moments, when she is genuinely hurt by their words or actions. They do not understand that she wants the best for them. They do not understand that she is choosing to be there, choosing to offer everything she has in order to help them succeed, in order to help them alter their life’s path. They do not understand that she is bleeding for them, straining to lift the blinders from their eyes and lead them into a different light.

They do not understand and so they act that way.

There are many times when second after agonizing second, she is pushed and pressed, crushed and led to her breaking point. She knows that their actions are not aimed at her, specifically. They are just going through hell and they do not know how to respond to it.

But what can she do?

If it were me, I would wash my hands of their blood. I am not responsible for them. ‘You crucify them according to your law,’ I would say.

But that is not what she does, because she walks the road of surrender. She died with her Lord and is alive with her Father. Therefore the wisdom she uses, the life she lives, I cannot understand for the cross is foolishness to me. The road of surrender is madness.

She told me she had a revelation. And how she views her students and deals with their lashings is absolutely how God deals with us daily, how one who walks the road of surrender acts all the time, unseen and unacknowledged.

When her students rise up to contest her, hurling verbal and physical insults, all in a feeble attempt at finding rest for their souls, she refuses to engage. I cannot impress how painful this was for her to allow their barbed prongs pierce her soul and yet keep sheathed her own sword. There are many times she stifles tears, not because her wounds hurt, but because she hurts for them; for she realizes what it is they are undergoing.

Sin is taking over.

Her children are becoming adults…and fear is the characteristic of adults.

When they rise up with their newly discovered power, their new self, she weeps and endures it. Oh, there are countless times when she desires for nothing more than to vindicate herself before them.

“I’m on your side!” she wants to scream. “I’m doing this for you! Stop attacking me!”

But they would not understand that message for it would come to them cloaked in rage, no matter how justified the core. And her vindication will only drive a wedge further between her and her students. It will not bring healing. It will only create more hurt and more scars.

No, in these moments, as she pulls their poisoned arrows from her soul, what she says she does is see them through new eyes, through the eyes of God.

In the same way that Christ remained silent before his brothers and sisters who mocked him as he hung upon the cross, she will not respond. She prays as he simply prayed; for she bears the same Spirit that Christ bore; for she sees something that her students, the mockers, do not. She knows a truth of the Great Story that they do not. And therefore, it is her duty to endure…and to forgive.

It is her charge from her Father that she absorb their blows and turn her anger inward, knowing that the God who brought her back to life is stronger. She knows that “he who is within me is greater than he who is within the world.” It is not natural to forgive and to offer unaccepted grace. But her new heart keeps whispering to her, ‘Go die with him!’ Her new heart is demanding her to respond in a new way, a way contrary to how anyone would expect a human to respond.

So when anger grows in these moments ready for retribution to be unleashed, suddenly she witnesses her students kneeling before the cross, right beside her, gazing upon their mutilated Savior. She knows in those moments what grace is, what forgiveness means. She knows that both her and her students are victims of the same incurable infection, both are filthy and scarred, and that the Savior who allowed himself to be nailed there, allowed himself to be killed for both of them.

And in these split-second moments, she imagines the blood flow down the wooden beams, irrigate the earth, and healing water begin to wash both of their dry, cracking souls. Then, the anger that was so palpable but a moment ago is replaced by grace. Calmly, new words will spring up and her new heart will whisper, “Forgive them Father, they know not what they do.”

Unblinking, she sits in reverie

As only among the few,

Enduring their bloodthirsty words

Like death to all that’s new

She lives to tell the living tale

From darkness, light has grew

 

And she is stung and pierced her soul

With no mercy she is spent

Like running water slipping till

The Word halts the descent

Their plans are foiled and death belied

Her joy, like buoyant flint!

 

So do not feel that all is woe

That mournful is her dirge

Though twice she found the thirty nine

Upon her back as scourge

Her unseen soul cast up like stars

To He, where they do merge.