Trundling down Bethlehem College’s grey brick sidewalk with an A3 modelling book under my arm and folder-laden backpack… the immensely deep thought came to me.
I love teaching.
Well it wasn’t just a thought, because it soon sprang out to Alarna walking beside me. We had just finished our micro-teaching session with Year 5 students. It was so good. And there we were, passing under the shades of the newly-leafed oak trees, walking back to BTI, our home in one way.
There’s been a lot of talk around me of discovering identity and finding out who you are- spiritual gifts as well as natural, personality as well as home heritage. The more we jump in to it, the more I realize how God made me to be a teacher. To do what I do now. “Just keep doing what you’re doing,” He said right before my birthday. Sometimes the path you’re on feels the hardest. However, when it’s God’s one, it’s totally the best. Because that mean’s it’s your one, too– made specifically and designed for your heart and your talents and your heritage. You are not a box of unconnected puzzle pieces. You are yourself, who God made you to be. Let’s get that in our heads a little more! Or more promptly, our hearts.
9 months. No, not a bubba, but I’m nine months through a primary (elementary) teaching degree. Honestly, for most of this time I’ve somehow thought I could ‘get away’ from my call to teach. Or rather, I would spiritualize it and think my teaching degree wouldn’t tie me down to one particular group or something, thinking God would call me into more “cool” things with it. However, I knew I’d always teach– but I could always see myself doing something else. Writing books, traveling the world. I mean, I will do those things (well in a sense I already do). But that day-to-day in the New Zealand primary school classroom… it looked so hard… odd… new… pioneering on hard ground… how would I do it? I doubted I could ever actually enjoy it.
Wait. God knows what He’s doing in me. He called me here.
And here’s my surprised confession after today, after looking over our past year of learning to teach:
I cannot see myself doing anything else.
WHAT?! WOAH. They tricked me!! I am in so deep that I cannot go back! I want to be a teacher! I am forever ruined for what I planned earlier! God has much better plans for my life than me! I chose to come here, oh I wanted to… but wow when we give Jesus the map of our lives- or rather, when you hold it together with Him- everything changes! He knows us. He knows that I like window seats and green hills and New Zealanders in general and how I needed to come back to live here. He knows how I personally integrate myself with my learning so much and how BTI’s essence is about that, and the size of the school was so like Makua Lani and so on and so forth. In short? He knows my heart. HE KNOWS YOU, TOO, MY READER!!
So my point is not that you should become a school teacher or even that you should go to New Zealand or write blogs… NO!! Oh, darlings, my longing is that you would give up control of your life and then give it to Jesus who loves you… and then months later, walk on a sidewalk after doing what God has called you to do in that hour… and that you would be able to say, Wow, I love it.
For, wow, He loves to see us smile… gifts are for the benefit of others, too. Simply, because He loves us, all of us. There’s so much more of His love than we’re living in right now. Come on, let’s go after Him together. He’s more than worth it.
