Personal Musings

This is another journal entry I wrote for one of my grad classes. It's got me wondering...

 

Robert Oprandy’s sixth question about combining personal and teacher identities is “How does language teaching fit into my vision of who I am (becoming) and how I’d like the world to be?” This is the hardest question of all six for me. The question Oprandy regards as the most important and understandably so, but I wonder if it is as important as we believe.

 

I honestly don’t know how teaching fits into my vision of what I am or who I am becoming. Since I was twelve, I planned on teaching (of course I’d been planning on being a writer since I was seven, but my grandmother talked me out of it, at least as a primary job). I didn’t have a clear idea what I wanted to teach, just that I would. As I continued to grow up, I thought I’d be a high school history teacher (I had a great one). I even studied history in college. Near the end of college I started to change my mind and decided I wanted to teach college level history instead of high school level. Well, my plans fell apart and neither position were possible for me after graduation. That’s when I found myself in China teaching English. A little connected to my original plan, but not much.

 

Now as I move toward the end of my third year teaching in China, it is clear I am to return to America. Why? No idea. Except everything seems to be pointing that way and I have an undeniable and indefinable peace from the Father. He also seems to be opening doors for a possible office job with ELIC in America. Not teaching this time – office work.

 

I look at the road I have traveled the last twenty-four years and it doesn’t make sense. It’s filled with contradictions and the impossible leaving me with no idea of where I am going or who I am becoming except in one area. I am becoming more obedient to the Father and I am going where He wants me to go.

 

So how does teaching fit my vision of who I am? It is what I was told to do and I (fairly) obediently have done for two and a half years. I have loved it and cried over it. I have worked toward excellence with no clearly defined goals except what ever He asks of me I will do to the best of my ability. I also trust He has a purpose for three years of EFL teaching and a Masters in TESOL though I don’t know what that purpose is. I guess my ultimate vision is to trust him completely and walk in obedience. In that sense, language teaching fulfills this vision as does writing and possible an office job. But the ultimate vision is the Father’s, not mine.

 So, how important is this question really? Or is the more important question about where your heart is, your focus? After all, can you really know what you’ll become before you do? We all have choices and our choices define our character, but not always what we become. There is so much more involved. Especially for those who lay down their lives and follow a path they have not drawn out, a path designed by a Creator who won’t tell where it goes, just asks us to trust Him. And that I do.

 

 

In no way is the above a reflection of theology or personal simplicity. I know the 'right' answers like many of us, but how do you tell that to your heart? How do you explain that to people who believe so differently? How can you ever justify it? There is simply faith.

 

"Faith cannot be unanswered,

Its feet are firmly planted on the Rock;

Amid the wildest storms it stands undaunted,

Nor shakes before the loudest thunder shock,

It knows Omnipotence has heard its prayer,

And cries, 'It will be done' - sometime, somewhere."

~ Ophelia G. Browning

I'm reading The Gift of a Stranger for a grad class and thought I'd post one of my reflections. It's kind of a whole new perspective for me :)

 

 

I have rarely considered whether unity or diversity is more spiritual, more desirable to the Father. However, as I read the common argument against diversity in The Gift of the Stranger, based on the Babel story, I realized this has been an underlying theology in my ideas and many around me – unspoken and unconsidered. A dangerous, ethnocentric idea that could destroy my effectiveness as a teacher and example in China. Life revels in diversity. It longs for it. Breathes it. And yet our sinful natures rebel against such ideas. There’s comfort, security, power in unity – look at the people of Babal. They forgot the call upon their lives, trying to replace it with security and power by uniting together. Even more we can see unity as powerful in Acts 2 when all the followers were gathered together and great power came upon them – they did not hold onto this power, though, desperate to keep it. They laid it down, realizing where the power truly came from and continued to follow the call placed on their lives – a call to GO.

 

So often, when people pull together in mock unity, they stop listening to truth and just listening to their own warped ideas of truth and what’s right. Smith and Carvill point out several times in chapter one the importance of ‘hearing’. Israel was called to be a hearing people and so are we. The Son called again and again for ‘those who have ears to hear.’ But hearing/listening is hard. To begin learning a new language one must listen – listen to the strange words, the strange sounds – if s/he ever wants to actually speak it. Listening/hearing requires caring about another person and truly considering the words spoken. Smith and Carvill say “Hearing the voice of the other takes time, commitment, sensitivity, vulnerability. When the other is a stranger, it might even involve learn the other’s language.” How important is this ‘other’ to each of us?

 

I really loved the section in chapter one about the voice of the stranger – a call to accept all people, no racism. Looking at the world now, I think “Ah, what a nice pipe dream.” Never going to happen. And it might not in my life time, but the day will come that all people do come together in all the beauty of diversity and then each of us must face the aliens we ignored, criticized or deemed lesser than ourselves. Basically those we treated in direct contrast to the desire of the Father, who we serve. The description of Israel on page 11 is a picture of how each of us should be, I believe (in a bit narrower sense as we are not whole nations on our own). “Beyond her[Israel’s] borders she is to be a light to the other nations; within her borders she is to be a blessing to strangers, to those from other nation who have taken up residence in her mist.” To those outside my immediate circle of influence I must be a light, a beacon drawing them into truth. To those inside my circle of influence (students, colleagues, teammates, etc…) I am to be a blessing, to those who may have never seen a foreign face before, to those whose heart’s are broken, to those who are significantly different from me. To love the one who is different from me, either due to language, skin color, culture, personality, or whatever, I am loving a stranger – a stranger, which is “a significant aspect of loving one’s neighbor as oneself.” – One of the two greatest commandments laid down by the Son.

 

And how do I show these strangers in my circle of influence that I love them. Well, I help them. I provide them with tools to improve their lives, with skills to overcome trouble, with unconditional love they may have never experienced, and with confidence to step into the world before them. And I can do all that in the language classroom. J

This stanza from a poem seems to speak the heart of what I want from my writing (at least currently). I must learn the depths and power of writing, not just the joy and logistics.

 

“Give me a new idea,” I said,

While thinking on a sleepless bed;

“A new idea that’ll bring to earth

A balm for souls of priceless worth:

That’ll give men thoughts of things above,

And teach them how to serve and love,

That’ll banish every selfish thought.

And rid men of the sins they’ve fought.”

~A.E. Finn