Blueprints

There's a ton of prep work when you’re going on an Emmaus walk. I was called to serve on the live in team again back in January. At the time, I didn’t feel as if I was able to be the type of Christian leader it took to serve. I was almost done with facilitating a men’s Bible study at church, but I had yet to feel that closeness I’ve had before. I was faking it until I was making it, but that approach made me feel hypocritical and judgmental of myself. I was going through another binge with pornography, which in itself was another attack on how I viewed myself. My appetite for food was just as bad. When you tell yourself that you’re a failure, every vice you have becomes magnified.

In order to prepare for the live in team, you meet on Thursday evenings for about 2 months. There’s tons of logistics to cover. You hear previews of the weekends’ talks (think of it as a short course on Christianity.) and you have fellowship and prayer with the team. At home there's preparation too, getting the schedules right, spending time with your family, packing. The night before I was to leave I brought up my nice overnight bag (again, waiting till the last minute is not suggested!). Our family cat decided it was a good time to sniff around the bag. I was folding clothes (again, I waited until the last second to wash the clothes I needed) and noticed him sitting in the bag. My kids pointed and said, “Dad, look.” Indeed the cat was sitting upright and rigid, and I began to think, is he pooping? I run over and the cat leaps forward, leaving behind a puddle of pee. In the moment it was both funny and maddening. My kids were rolling on the floor laughing, snapping pictures for Instagram. Despite the fact that I was as ready as I could be, the cat reminded me that no amount of smugness and prep was good enough for what God was going to do. Here’s what I think of your Christianity. That pee was metaphorical!

The weekend did not go the way of the cat (my pastor says that cats are a product of the Fall and now I see why). God showed up big time. 17 men gave their life to Christ, sealing covenants that were made before they were a heartbeat in their mother’s womb.

There's a moment during the weekend when we release those moments that are keeping us in chains. I was reminded once again that God seeks the unqualified, the lost and the broken. We like to think, men especially, that we have to have it altogether in order to receive the love of Christ. Nothing could be further from the truth. God is the one that qualifies our calling, that shines light on our path and heals our brokenness. The same could be said for me. I was reluctant to take the next step in my faith, my calling, simply because I felt unqualified. I had this idea that by now I was supposed to be this Rock of a man. No wonder the cat decided to piss on my idealistic chest thumping!

In my talk this weekend (for those who have been to Emmaus, I gave the Growth Through Study Talk. For the uninitiated, it was a speech on giving your mind to God) I used a metaphor by way of George MacDonald in Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. In Mere Christianity, Lewis quotes MacDonald, who wrote, “Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on: you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently he starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of—throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.”

Each word I spoke from the podium just seeped from a reservoir I never knew I had. The words weren’t just for the men, but it was for me.. Here I am thinking God is using me to change the hearts of the men all the while he was transforming mine. And that’s what the passage above meant to me. When I gave my life to Christ, I allowed God into my heart for the first time. I knew there were things to be fixed—the rotted wood of my foundation, the leaky pipes, the holes in the roof. My life after Emmaus has been God doing the house mending. But like MacDonald says, I was looking for the comfortable life. I wanted what I thought all Christians had—a life of ease and joy.

It’s funny what I project onto others. Just because I became a Christian didn't mean I swore off the lenses on which I viewed the world. The congregants that sat around me seemed so much “put together” than I was but I chalked that up to Christian maturity. I'll get there someday, I thought. I’ll be that elder that some young guy will look up to. I’ll have that look! You can see the family cat just getting ready for that chest pumper to open up his luggage!

I have heard time and time again that “God gives you only what you can handle.” It’s one of those Christian-ese sayings that make as much sense as hedges of protection, travel mercies and taking Bible quotes out of context. But God doesn’t want us to just “handle” life. MacDonald compares that to our “decent little cottage.” I so want the decent little cottage. But God is into big and bold. He’s building a palace! A palace takes new additions, a breaking down of walls, and a new blueprint. He’s the ultimate contractor.

So I had a chance once again to lay down my failures at the cross that weekend at Emmaus. Who else could take these chains? I took a realistic look at my 2015. Why was I still making these same mistakes? Why didn’t I believe in myself? Laying that failure down is giving the contractor of my life full reign to do what He desires. My life wasn't made for me just to handle, it was made to radically live out God’s plan.

I don’t know where that path will take me. Already I have a renewed vigor for my family. I haven't viewed porn for almost 3 weeks and I am making the needed heart adjustments to stave off my thoughts of lust (which is just another form of idol worship!). The Spirit has been at work, that's for sure. All the new, bold steps I took for God during this babe-in-Christ season was a step into the unknown—mission trips, work camps, facilitating classes, etc. I can't wait to see what He will do with this unqualified, broken, failure of a man. What he sees is a blueprint for success. It’s what He sees in all of us. Take that scary step, dear reader, into what he wants for you.

The Cost of Nuetrality

Nothing really prepares you for teaching. This is a multi-faceted remark that envokes more than just one person's philosophy or pedagogy. It was obvious I needed more fine tuning of my classroom management when I first began teaching more than 10 years ago. I also had to work on my delivery, as yelling was my preferred method of control. Now many years later and I do not recognize the teacher I have become. I barely recognize the students.

My first teaching assignment was at Broadleigh Elementary. It is an east side school here in Columbus, nestled between the airport, a ghetto, an affluent Jewish community and a trailer home for immigrants and their families. It was a unique school environment, one in which provided the training ground for my methods and attitudes to be tested. My biases had to be melted away one by one. There were no teaching manuals or skills sessions that could have prepared me for the barriers we all faced.

When most problems arose, I yelled. When students stole from one another, I yelled at them. When they misbehaved in the bathroom or in the halls, I chewed them out. When they got into fights at recess, I got into their faces. I'm sure the Lord was looking at me and thinking, "I wonder if Reynaldo understands the irony of the situation." Especially when it came to bullying.

My first experience with bullying was with a student from Mauritania. He knew no English and had no background in schooling. Back home in his country, when students went to school, he stayed in the village and played soccer or ran with the boys. He could scribble, bob his head up and down and used a variety of simple phrases to get his point across. Two boys in room decided he was a vulnerable target. They harassed him in the bathroom and teased him at recess. Once I finally got wind of what was going on, I handled the situation like I handled all the others--I yelled. I made sure the bully boys had an audience when I did so. It was a rant so epic that I had one of them in tears. Teaching a bully not to bully by being the biggest bully of them all. Now that takes some special training! In a strange twist of fate, one of the boys in question moved. I used it as a way to conveneintly assert my authority. "Oh, you know what happened to Sam? He was expelled for bullying. Don't let it happen to you." I even had a student who contradicted that claim, saw Sam at the mall or something. "Mr. C, he said he moved." "When you get expelled youre not supposed to talk about it with anyone." Case dismissed.

So now what do I do in these situations? Just like then, the word bullying and the actual act of bullying resides in that grey area that's hard to pinpoint or evaluate. Everyone thinks they are being bullied. I always thought bullying was a continual and habitual teasing and threatening of someone over a course of time. I never considered what the kids do today as bullying. When you're making fun of one another's mothers, or your sarcastic comment about someone's shoes is met with the same sarcastic comment, it's not bullying--at least not to me. LGBTQ advocates used the word "bullying" as a way to garner sympathy to the effect it was having on gay and lesbian teenagers who were committing suicide at an alarming rate. What were we doing or saying to these children that was causing them to seek suicide as a solution? Christians took some heat too, as if we were the reason why these particular subset of kids were killing themselves. Had we been using the Bible to scare kids into conformity? Were we saying all the right things but secretly our fear and ignorance was being displayed on social media platforms. These kids who would normally go home to their safe environment were now being harassed 24/7.

Every counselor earned their pay on anti-bullying campaigns, posters, assemblies and lunch groups. There were Bully Free Zones set up in schools nationwide. People were beginning to have the conversation, and much of it was met with excuses.

Kids just need to have thicker skin.
I was made fun of when I was a kid and I did alright.
These kids today are pansies. Pussies. Faggots. Whiners. Anti-American pinko commies.

But kids were still killing themselves. And it wasn't just the gay kids. It was kids who you never thought would have been the target--popular kids, athletes, "normal" kids. It wasn't just the overweight girls we picked on, or the junior high girl who was called a slut just because she had a cup size, or the geeky spaz, the nerd. You know I was raised on a culture of movies that made it seem like making fun of nerds, spazzes, geeks and fat girls was okay. Revenge of the Nerds. Porky's. Ferris Bueller. Sixteen Candles. They all had their moment when we laughed at Joan Cusack (she seemed like she was in all of them!) for wearing a back brace or head gear for braces. But these students of mine have not seen these movies. Those movies are foreign to them. So why is the teasing and bullying so prevalent now than ever before?

Last week I reached out on Facebook on behalf of a student who has been a target all her life. She's the type of girl I would have made fun of when I was a kid. Listening to her story, I sensed more than just the usual they-won't-leave-me-alone phrases. I sensed a girl who was really hurting.

Mr. C, how can in just ignore it when it happens everyday?
My mom says their just jealous, just tell them "jelly" and walk away, but it doesn't work.

What was I to say? All the books and manuals are silent when it comes to these conversations you're having with a 5th grade girl, holding her hand while she cries. There's no chapter for that, no appendix. A girl who understands that fighting back isn't the only answer and that sometimes there are ramifications for those actions. Tough people like to tell me, "Let them fight it out. One punch to the bully's face and it'll stop." They were not raised in an environment where kids film other kids getting beat up on the street corner. They weren't raised where parents are not monitoring what their kids are doing, or simply don't care enough to realize what's really happening.

I looked at a blog almost two years ago. It barely mentioned one of my group lessons on staying neutral during conflict. I helped the kids understand that when Hitler came into power during WWII, there were those that suffered tremendously, too long, until other countries stepped up. Some countries joined Germany, like Italy under Mussolini. Japan took advantage of the situation to usurp their dominance by bombing Pearl Harbor. Other countries were helpless, like Poland. Other smaller European countries were waiting for England and America to pick up the fight. But Switzerland was something different. They remained neutral, but historians have proven that Switzerland had an interesting role. They refused Jewish refugees and continued to hold bank accounts for Nazi's. In a sense, these actions and inactions allowed Germany to reign with an iron fist.

I know this is a simplistic view of a complicated situation. But the point was made. When your classmates are being made fun of, are you remaining neutral, are you joining in or are you fighting back? So many of today's kids laugh when someone is made fun of. When my girl walks up in line, I have seen pockets of them move away like she smells, or that her presence alone is something of a disease. At lunch, they act like sitting on her row is something akin to washing a leper's feet. And all the while, the Switzerland's of the class watch it and do nothing. They know it's wrong, but to say something, especially when some of the hecklers are friends, would mean they too would lose something.

This conversation opened up the floodgates. Many of my Switzerland's wrote me notes and objected to excluding them from the Bully Free Zone lunch table later that afternoon. How many times has your classmate been made fun and you sat there and did nothing? My bullies claimed to be made fun of themselves. One bully said she didn't want to be one any longer, cried at my desk. Other kids wrote me letters that they had been teased too, thought about suicide. My principal thinks my students haven't made adequate progress when it comes to their test scores, and I'm in a sea of depression, wondering how I can counsel them through this time.

This saga is not finished. After posting on Facebook, I have several options I can now bring to the table to help this young lady. There's martial arts courses, church groups, middle school options and peer groups. The fight isn't over but I feel like I have more to offer. Yelling at the bullies isn't working anymore, if it ever did. These are a new breed of kids, ones who don't have work the empathy of their predecessors. If I can change the heart of one student, and provide a path to salvation for another, I can sleep at night. No test scores will matter in the end.

The God of Promotions

It's good to be home.

A conversation began a few months back as to the changes one goes through in life. One of my constants had always been journaling. I always have a small notebook with me at church. It has kept my scattered brain from focusing on the tasks that need to get done later in the day and my eyes off attractive woman. Those notes are like ones I'd make in a classroom. Sometimes I'd jot notes in my Bible depending on my devotion of the day, but that too, like my journaling habit, eroded into excuses and no-time-for-that's. I haven't blogged in several months. Why? I blamed lots of things, from not working with a keyboard (I have upgraded to an iPad Air), to the favorite of all Christian excuses, "I'm just in a down season." Christians like to talk about seasons and hedge of protections and travel mercies but we really have no clue what any of them really mean, or that none of them have any Biblical basis. So, dear reader, it wasn't a down season for me, just a life that hasn't been living to its full potential.

I was glad 2015 ended. I ended the school year on fumes, much more than I had ever felt any time previous. My rough week turned into a rough month and into a rough year. I chalked it up to having a "bad class" but that just sounded like something teachers' always said when they failed and were trying to cover up the stench of a career. On a side note, many of my students are struggling this year in the core subjects of math and reading and many of them had a teacher the previous year who was earning a paycheck and counting the days until her pension. I began to see that a year lost from their education, a year removed from good practices and a lack of motivation, had a detrimental effect on those that could least afford it.

But there were parallels in my story and theirs. In order to garner any kind of results from them, I too had to be motivated to grind. Just when I felt I had a grasp on this, in comes life like a thief in the night. Curriculum shifts brought in new reading and math programs. Now I was jumping through hoops to find some consistency in what I was teaching. And the lingering disease that was my 2015 year had not fully dissipated. There were still clouds in the horizon and I wasn't disciplined enough to see through them.

But where was my motivation?

Answering this question has further reaching ramifications than my classroom. I was forced to examine all my habits. I'm on the upswing of another weight gain. I lost probably 40 pounds since the beginning of the school year, then gained about 15 back. There's a constant fight between food, gym time and staying active. This is nothing new. I know that God wants the best for my health. He's keeping me alive this long! I know that the failures I've faced have more to do with Satan's schemes than God's dream. But the reality is, I have only so long before the other domino begins to fall.

Like my job for instance.

A few weeks back I was told I would be moving down from 5th grade to 2nd. I took the news as a demotion. Last year It seemed as if all my weaknesses and bad habits formed a perfect storm. I wasn't as confident going into this year, and there have been some humbling moments along the way. Although I can't ever say I have reached the pinnacle of teaching success, I at least felt competent. This was the first year I questioned myself, and when doubt creeps into your mind, it rarely ever leaves.

Any teacher knows what we're up against. This is the realm of computerized testing and value added evaluations. Metrics so complicated there's no solid way of knowing just how effective you are. America has become a test driven nation. We're bound by the scores given by the states that are funded by the federal government. How much time do I have to prepare for an online test? One hour per week, but the website for practice tests has a solid six questions. Six. An insufficient amount for a test that is typically in the 45-50 question amount. You would think what we do in class would translate but that's easy for you to say when you have a click happy kid whose reading at a 3rd grade level.

Let me dial back the excuses. I'm not the most organized teacher. What I have in excitement and engagement I lose in structure. This year I failed to hear the phone ringing from the office. Why? We were doing a science lab where my students were working on sound. They were tapping and banging glass bottles half filled with water to make different pitches. Some were listening to their partners speak to them through a can-and-string telephones. No one was just bonkers wild and loud, but it gave the impression I had no control of my room.

My test scores? They suck. On average my students were almost 30 points behind the benchmark in math and reading. Their middle of the year scores were atrocious. I could chalk two scores up to learning disabilities, one finally diagnosed and one in the process. While the kids who can read did fairly well and I did have some decent achievements, the ones who are behind seemed to fall even more so. This is nothing new. I've spent recess times working on intervention methods with the students and even after trying new strategies, their post test scores are maybe gaining 20-30%. I can't seem to get the results of my counterpart.

Perhaps I need to stick to one reading series. For example, our school is piloting new basal readers. I tossed out the old and I'm using the new materials, exploring their resources and taking chances. I could have stuck to the script, given the same old stories and the same old tests.  Math is changing too. I've been trained on the new math program the district is implementing. All last year I used NY Engage, a Common Core based approach to teaching math. So it's all new again. I could have stayed with the old, but I'm not becoming the teacher who goes to training sessions and refuses to try new strategies. I'm playing the game but I'm losing the late innings.

Still, the blessings continue to pour in. My colleagues are excited about my new assignment. I'm making classroom visits and getting to know my curriculum. I'm beginning to see that I won't have to deal with drama and aloofness. Stubborn kids will always be there, and I'm not sure what to do when they start crying. Perhaps it will be the move that jump starts a rejuvenation in me. It's the kind of jolt an active God does with complacent hearted men.

This weekend I get to serve on another Emmaus team. I get to turn off the noise of my failures and look upward for guidance and deliverance. Again, I'm awed at His timing and thankful for the grace I don't deserve. It couldn't come at a better time. What better way to know that what you're doing matters when the God of your life turns demotions into promotions. I'm ready to accept.