In His Sight

For one very long semester, I worked as a substitute teacher. The phone would ring before the sun came up, and I got my assignment for the day. On a particularly cold morning, I found myself in a room with fifteen EBD (Emotionally and Behaviorally Disordered), elementary-aged students from around our school district. There was one other adult who served as an aide, but he left before attendance was taken to help find an EBD student who was a "runner." She had escaped immediately after arriving on the bus. All was not chaos. The regular teacher had left instructions on his desk. I passed around nametags and markers, then set out to collect them. One young man, a big sixth-grader, did not comply with my request to write his name. He watched as I neared him. "What's your deal?" he asked, spinning a thick book around the top of his desk. "I'm the substitute," I said brightly. "Yeah, I get that," he said. "What's your deal, though

In the fifties, farming community schoolhouses in Texas were often all-inclusive. One of the smallest schools I attended was housed in a two story, brick building with a gigantic bell hanging from the entryway rafters. It was the same school that my parents attended in the thirties. My mother tells about riding a horse to get there with her older brother. He was fond of encouraging the horse with the ends of the reins and “accidentally” swatting Mother’s leg instead. At this school, the first and second grades had their own detached classroom, nicknamed “the dog house”. But the first floor of the main building housed combinations of all the other elementary grades while the second floor was reserved for the high school students. My first year there, I was in the fifth grade. Although elementary students outnumbered the high school attendees, we were nonetheless admonished daily to keep our voices down – even at recess – lest we disturb those elite high school students who were dili

No pun intended, but I watched Groundhog Day again this month. In the movie, Bill Murray’s character is perfectly obnoxious until he finally gets his life right by living the same day over and over, but learning from each rerun. Paying closer attention to his actions and reactions was tough for him and it is often the same with me. My heart might benefit if God reconstructed my learning curve in a similar format:   every time I behave in a manner unworthy of my faith, I will wake up tomorrow and discover that it is today – again and again. All my tomorrows will be the same until I recognize each error of my ways and make things right. In other words, I might never make it past an existence of only a handful of tomorrows. On the positive side, I might have truthfully remained forever in my twenties. Would it help if Sonny and Cher busted out “I Got You, Babe”, as in the movie, to consistently awaken us to our new selves in Christ ? Anything is possible. Just imagine the plethora of o

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