It was a beautiful letdown
When I crashed and burned
When I found myself alone
Unknown and hurt
It was a beautiful letdown
The day I knew
That all the riches this world had to offer me
Would never do
In a world full of bitter pain
And bitter doubts
I was trying so hard to fit in
Fit in, until I found out
I don't belong here (I don't belong)
I don't belong here (I don't belong)
I will carry a cross and a song
Where I don't belong
I don't belong

"The Beautiful Letdown," Switchfoot 

Since I've been a teacher, or something like it, the end of the school year (and first semester) has always been something of an anti-climax.  The last day of school seems to be about a week long, in the sense that nobody really feels like doing anything, and by the time students finally go home for good...I don't know, but it's almost like the whole semester/year never happened.

Maybe that feeling is an artifact of the schools I've been in, where retention of any sort is low and I feel like I'm treading water with the majority of my students.  I'm not even sure exactly what it is I'm expecting, but I know it's...not quite this.  When I think back to my own high school days, I know I adored most of my teachers, but now I wonder if they knew that then?  I tend to put a high priority on letting the important people in my life know how much they mean to me, but I've noticed that...most other people don't do that.  Aaaaand that's kind of disappointing, especially when I feel like I've given so much.  (Codependent much?  Haha, I'll get to that some other time.)  A few weeks ago one of my darling and troublesome little boys told me I was the best teacher ever--and a first-year too!--and all I can think was, "Oh, Chase, if only you knew how much it's cost me to be here..."

This has been a year in which very little turned out the way I expected or wanted.  I thought teaching was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, though I knew going in that I probably didn't want to stay in this district for more than two or three years.  Now I'm questioning whether classroom teaching is truly a good fit for my strengths and preferences.  I thought that my students would be good little people stuck in tough situations, and they are...only the situations seem to win more often than not.  (And then I have to admit that some of them just aren't that good after all.)  I thought that I was a big girl ready for the real world, and it turns out that I was just ignoring the hurt and terrified little girl inside until she started to scream...and scream...and scream, until I couldn't ignore her anymore.  I thought (sort of) that maybe I was finally going to get things right relationship-wise, and I just got on the same sick cycle carousel as before, only I spun out (and jumped off, to give myself credit) much faster.  I thought that maybe, after a year of trial in grad school, I was finally going to get things right, but in fact it became much worse.

As I think about all this, however, I realize that I wasn't actually blindsided by any of these things, though I think the magnitude of my losses and disappointments was kind of surprising.  If I had been in a clearer state of mind, and better in touch with God and community, I might have seen it all coming.  Then again, if that were the case, it probably wouldn't have been this bad either.  And if I had seen it all coming...I probably would have run, and I would have missed out on a lot of lessons.

It was a beautiful letdown
When You found me here
Yeah, for once in a rare blue moon
I see everything clear
I'll be a beautiful letdown
That's what I'll forever be
And though it may cost my soul
I'll sing for free

I wrote in a journal entry shortly after I decided to take this job that there were probably things I would learn here that I couldn't learn back home, and while there is a panoply of excluded alternatives that I will never know, that prediction is most likely true.  Once again I am brought back to the idea of the desert that I first encountered two years ago:

Therefore I am now going to allure her;
I will lead her into the wildernessand speak tenderly to her.
There I will give her back her vineyards,
and will make the Valley of Achor a door of hope.
There she will respond as in the days of her youth,
as in the day she came up out of Egypt.
Hosea 2:14-15

This is after Israel is stripped down and laid waste, and God doesn't sound like a very nice person at all.  But I always go back to this part because He does restore and renew, which was His purpose all along.  When disappointment piles on thick and loss and sorrow are so heavy I think I'm going to die...something tells me that it is not always going to hurt this much. That Someone knows I'm here.  And that Someone is good, even when everything else is not.

I have a persistent habit of turning my needs into shoulds, which has caused me no small amount of unnecessary angst. This week it felt like I had to go from 0 to 724 instantly, which resulted in some major whiplash. God reminded me about the need to distinguish between my...

I seem to have developed the unfortunate habit of only posting once a month. (Actually, it's just a manifestation of an existing habit of withdrawing from the world when I'm having a hard time.) I am recovering from a not insignificant meltdown precipitated by my long-standing and profound fear of...joy.

Just when I was closer than ever to the teacher and missionary God has called me to be, I had an involuntary Jonah reflex, but instead of hating the people I'm supposed to minister to, I turned on myself as a way of subconsciously running from God. It's very strange because it's not like I even wanted to, and in fact I would be having a perfectly good day, then suddenly I am warring against my own body with unprecedented violence. I finally scared myself straight last week, but I'm afraid that will only last so long...

I'm sad because I still don't trust God enough to give me good things in abundance. I'm sad that I am still, at some level, tensed up waiting for the next shoe to drop. I'm sad that even though I've forgiven the person for leaving, I haven't quite forgiven God for letting him go, and that fear of loss still clouds my vision. And I hate that I've given the enemy this weapon to use against me when I'm so close to being free.

"Sometimes I feel it's all just too big to be true
I sabotage myself for fear of what my bigness could do"
-Alanis Morissette, "Fear of Bliss"

But I do have hope that this will pass. I don't know how or when, but I do know that God doesn't want this for me, and maybe I can come to want better for myself.

[edit] I also realized that even though I don't trust God nearly as well as I'd like to, I do trust Him enough so that my doubt doesn't scare me quite so much as it used to. It's comforting to think that, despite it all, I am still on my way to keeping God in His proper place and me in mine. [/edit]

"Yet, O LORD, you are our Father. We are the clay, you are the potter; we are all the work of your hand." Isaiah 64:8

I now have a far better understanding of this verse than I ever did before, thanks to just a week of ceramics class. After I went home the first day I remember thinking, "Oh, yeah, this is why I avoided the wheel like the plague in high school!" But with a few days of intense practice, I went in for about an hour and a half today and threw three cylinders and only one reject! Somehow they all inevitably wind up the same diameter, differing only in height, but hopefully I'll be able to branch out a little bit.

The most important thing I've learned is the importance of centering. This was always what tripped me up in high school, so I was a little concerned when I still couldn't do it right after four hours of practice. But it is absolutely essential to have the clay centered, because if you open an uncentered lump of clay and try to shape it, the entire piece will be off. (I have finally gotten this skill down fairly well, though sometimes I cheat and manage to coax a marginally off-center piece to completion.)

I'm seeing the same pattern in my life: my efforts at ministry seem to have been constantly frustrated for the past few months (or maybe I just feel that way, but that feeling is real enough to have rather serious repercussions for me personally and those around me) and I think it is because I am not able to focus on the right Person. There is an old problem resurfacing that I thought I had buried, but obviously not deep enough. A lot of what I've done in the past twelve months, even the "good" stuff, has been me trying to ignore that off-centeredness and forge ahead anyway. To a certain degree, God let me go with it, even as far as Taiwan, but now things are spinning out of control and I am on the verge of collapsing. And I can only pray that He can and will bring me back to center.

This is the sterilized version of "things". I wrote a much rawer entry last night but accidentally deleted it before posting. I believe that was God guarding my privacy better than I am able, so I'm not going to try to rewrite it, but if you read this, please pray that I can receive forgiveness and healing from what I have dubbed spiritual diabetes. Thanks.

All my single ladies...


:::::::::::::::::Girls::::::::::::::::::::::
:::::::::::are like apples::::::::::::::::
::::::on trees. The best ones::::::::::
:::::are at the top of the tree.::::::::
:::The boys don't want to reach:::::::
::for the good ones because they::::
:are afraid of falling and getting hurt.
:Instead, they get the rotten apples:
from the ground that aren't as good,
but easy. So the apples up top think:
something's wrong w/ them when in::
:reality they’re amazing. They just:::
:::have to wait for the right boy to::
:::: come along, the one who’s:::::::
::::::::::: brave enough to::::::::::::
:::::::::::::::climb all::::::::::::::::::::
:::::::::::::::the way:::::::::::::::::::
::::::::::::::to the top::::::::::::::::::

So this little burble has been around since I was in high school and I always thought this was just a lame attempt by unpopular girls (like, oh I don't know, me) to feel better about their dateless selves. I realized today though that I never believed I was truly a good apple. Deep down I saw myself as a rotten, easy-to-reach apple and couldn't understand why there still wasn't anyone reaching for me. Frustrating, yes? This quarter I need Jesus to help me see that I am the apple of his eye.

Psalm 17:8 - Keep me as the apple of your eye; hide me in the shadow of your wings.

Sarah put it this way (and I'm paraphrasing): You're a diamond, but some guys can only handle cubic zirconium because diamond is too costly. Almost instantly the phrase, "Like a diamond in the sky," popped into my head, which is funny because it's related to the proposal scenario I dreamed up this week in Atlanta while looking at this piece of art:

We go out to the country, or at least away from the city, during the summer meteor shower to stargaze. We take turns naming constellations, then he points to a specific star. "Do you know what that one is called?" "No, I don't." "I named it for you." "Really??" "Yup. That's Jennifer. Jennifer [insert his last name here]." (At this point there will probably be a great deal of squealing. And some sort of diamond involved.)

So as Twinkle Twinkle is playing through my head, I realized that I need to be my own diamond in the sky before I can expect someone else to name a star after me! Diamonds are forged in the extreme heat and pressure of the earth (or lab, which I kind of prefer just to make sure no child was harmed in the extraction of my engagement ring), and are the hardest mineral known to man. Real diamonds are rarely flawless, but that's one of the ways you can tell a real diamond from cubic zirconia or other imitations. (It's kind of like Adam was talking about at church today: the point of Christianity is not to make everyone into a bunch of spiritual Stepford wives, but to allow us to live life to the fullest both here and after we die physically. The flaws and kinks and imperfections and ROYAL SCREW-UPS OF DOOM at the very least allow us to relate to other people; they also press us closer to God if we get on the right side of it.) And to borrow a passage from Les Miserables that I read today, "Diamonds are found only in the dark bowels of the earth; truths are found only in the depths of thought. It seemed to him [Jean Valjean] that after descending into those depths after long groping in the blackest of this darkness, he had at last found one of these diamonds, one of these truths and that he held it in his hand; and it blinded him to look at it." Pray for me as Jesus grinds and polishes me...