To Jane, with Love

Thoughts on my sweet school:

I suppose I should blame Jane Witte. In 1985 I was sitting in her English 8 class in the old shoebox on 92nd Avenue and she came over and said she wanted to talk to me at break time. Before she could even finish, I bellowed “But I haven’t done anything wrong this time…” although maybe I had and just couldn’t remember, which was very possible. At break Jane sat me down and explained to me that she thought I was a much better student and a much better writer than I let on, and she wondered if I would be open to some mentoring and encouragement because she thought, for some ridiculous reason, that maybe I would grow up and be an English teacher someday. I laughed. Perhaps it was a holy laugh because that conversation changed the trajectory of my life forever. The Kingdom of God was crashing into my life at that moment, and I knew it, even though I wouldn’t admit it to anyone.

The joy of my work at school is that I have moments like that every day. The Kingdom of God crashes into our school when young a child runs up to me and squeels because he has a caterpillar crawling up their arm; or when I see a big grade 7 guy walking hand in hand with a quiet and shy kindergarten student on the Terry Fox run, or when a middle school students creates a piece of art work that is much more beautiful than anything they could have imagined. Those are the moments when heaven and earth seem to be so close, when time stands still I feel like am standing on holy ground in a holy place. It is those moments I really do know in my gut what it means when someone whispers “God is in this place.”

But even though I know that one day all shall be well, I also know that all is not well. I can and perhaps should be discouraged because things are not the way God intended them to be. God's creation suddenly groans at our school when a student is bullied, there is an incident on the bus, a friend is intentionally ignored, someone makes fun of a new haircut. We should all groan with creation because the world and the people in it are broken, but we should also cling to the hope that we are not defeated. We dream of reconciliation and restoration and trust that one day all things will be made new, that there indeed will be a new creation.

Each day at school, our students are invited to experience wholeness, quite often they say “Yes” to this invitation, but at times the answer is “No”. When I walk and talk with students, I can be overwhelmed by how many students experience the shadow side of wholeness, and I grieve because I think these children are too young to know the brokenness of God’s kingdom. Children who have wounds I cannot even begin to understand. These deep wounds that fester and spoil and remind me of things I can't or don't want to understand.

Maybe one of the ways we keep our promise to educate for wholeness is that each student, no matter what their story, should experience the Kingdom of God crashing into their lives. For some students, the kingdom is the simple fact that people call them by their first name, for others it realizing for the first time that they are gifted in music or science or athletics, for others the kingdom of God is right there when they finally, for the first time ever, learn to do the letter “g” the right way instead of doing it backwards. For others, the kingdom of God crashes into their lives because being at school is the safest six hours of a student’s life, or when reconciliation and restoration is reached between two students who really do want to find a better way to live faithfully in community.

When you walk the halls at our school, I hope you too can whisper that God is in this place and that you can see the Kingdom of God in our hallways and classrooms. Pray for each of our students, but maybe pray specifically for those who feel like they are living more in the shadows, and remember that each of us—teacher, parent, student-- is blessed to be a blessing; and perhaps your kingdom work today is to maybe pull the clouds away from someone so that they are a little less in the shadow, and a little more in the Son.