Tire Swings

A young student stood in my doorway and stared at me. If I have seen a sadder face in my life, I cannot remember it. His glistening eyes suggested he was on the edge of tears.

“What is the matter? You look so sad? If you are sad, then I am sad,” I said, drawing on all the empathy I had inside of me.

“Mr. B, I don’t think you are doing your job. It is the grade 2′s turn on the tire swing but all the big kids are on it because you haven’t made up a new tire swing schedule. The principal’s job is to make a tire swing schedule and you haven’t done your job.”

And with that, my new reality as a Pre-Kindergarten-Grade 4 administrator set in. And I knew, in a way, this child was right. I wasn’t doing my job.

I must admit, I love my job. This teaching staff and these young image bearers of God breathe new life into me every day. As a staff, we are diligent and work hard at being faithful to the vision of our schools and the trust that parents have put in us to educate, care, and love their children in the servant way of Jesus. But being faithful sometimes asks a lot of us. Being faithful can be exhausting. Being faithful means our journey will sometimes be more difficult than easy. But being faithful also means that the decisions we make, no matter how simple or complex will be blessed by God, even though sometimes those blessings are more tangible to see on some days than others.

Over the past few weeks I have also come to realize that creating tire swing schedules, posting students pictures on my wall, and playing soccer with children are really, really important. To most people, in the big scope of Christian education, a tire swing schedule seems like a very minute detail. But if Christian education is truly about teaching God’s covenantal children, then those minute details are actually some of the most important evidence that we are practically working out our mission and vision in the hallways and classrooms of our schools. How can we claim to be “educating for wholeness” (our school's mission) and ignore the injustices taking place on the playground? Or how can I possibly say “No” when a grade three student in asks me to hang his personally written “Psalm of Confession” on my door where he confesses: I’m sorry Lord, sorry for making looks, sorry for not helping, sorry for hiding. I am sorry Lord. Forgive me.

Yes Lord, forgive us when we are not faithful and ignore the small but important things in a child’s life. The hanging of a poem on a door may seem like a small gestures to some, but those acts of hospitality are important to our students, so then they must be important to us. After all, isn’t this how God our Father in Heaven works?

How small and trite must our requests seem to God? But when I consider how deep the Father's love for us is, so deep that he considers us his children and made us in His image, a God who knows us so well that He even knows when a hair falls from our head, I have confidence that He knows that our requests, however small, are really big. Because he loves us, he hears us. And He listens to us. The simple act of listening and hearing is one way God is faithful to us and honors us as His children. So should it be in our relationship with the children we teach.