A Reminder on Valentine's Day

Teaching comes with a mixed bag of emotions. Most days, I am overwhelmed by the responsibility of caring for and teaching 20 children for 200 days out of a year. That's 1400 hours a year of character building. It's 1400 hours where they might come to love learning or hate it. It's 1400 hours of nurturing their sense of self-worth or tearing them apart.

The responsibility can be so overwhelming at times that I want to leave the job and run away from anything that gives me any bit of influence on children's lives. Who am I? I have no idea what I'm doing. Do all these hours really make a difference? Does it make a good difference?

But then there are moments when I can really believe that it's not about me. In those moments I can really believe that God's grace is really enough for all the ways I mess up in my classroom.

That moment came this morning when Frank walked into my room. I had been really hard on Frank last year. I moved his clip almost daily, had many talks with him about his aggression, and challenged him to live up to his potential because he wasn't doing it. I'm sure I had given him many irritated, frustrated looks and I definitely used some not-so-nice tones with him. Regardless, Frank walked in today, taller than me and almost double my size now, with a bag of chocolate in his hands. "Happy Valentine's Day, Ms.Wong." My heart melted.

I'm not sure what brought him back with Valentine greetings, but it meant so much that he came back. For me, it was a good reminder that God's grace covers over all the ways I mess up in the classroom. He makes up for all the ways I fall short and gives me hope for the kids who feel impossible to get through to. It helps me to trust that I'm just called to follow the best I know how and He'll do the rest.

And, sometimes, I'm lucky enough to see that some bit of those 1400 hours do matter.