Pride Goeth etc.

I am not a superstitious person, but I find myself sorely tempted to knock on wood or cross my fingers the next time I write a post like that last one.

I had, in a sense, been expecting it, but when it came it was still an unwelcome, even humiliating, development. On Friday, my day off, my boss, Bruce, called me. He asked me if, the next day, I would like to cancel my classes and instead have a day-long clinic on lesson planning. I agreed, of course.

It was handled in the most kind and helpful way imaginable (Bruce is a great guy). Every allowance was made for my inexperience and lack of education. The obvious intent was to help and not to chastise. Most importantly, it really did give me a much better idea of what I wasn't doing correctly and/or sufficiently in my classes. This, however, was the irksome aspect of things: I didn't want it to be necessary to improve my performance. It is a childish and unrealistic way to look at things, no doubt, and a reflection of a flaw in my personality. However, the fact is that this helpful, necessary, gracefully administered and completely constructive criticism rankled severely when it collided with my pride. Let me be clear: this was not a legitimate feeling in any possible way, it was a fit of pique. To my meager credit, I recognized immediately how silly I was being, and managed to keep it all inside, to the extent that I was praised for my attitude by Bruce.

I felt much better the following evening when Steven, Jane, and their family (cf pictures in this post) threw me a little impromptu birthday dinner, complete with a cake and presents from each member of the family. It was a thoughtful gesture, and I was deeply moved. We played a slightly modified version of pickup sticks, chatted, laughed, ate (I finally know what is meant by "goulash." I was quite satisfied) and I relaxed and got almost completely over my internal tantrum from the previous day, or so I thought. The next day went quite well, highlighted by a cake that was made for me by Bruce's wife *ahem* I mean by Bruce. It was amazing cake, some kind of sticky chocolaty thing, not too sweet but sweet enough- in a word, ambrosial. I ate so much of it I ended up taking my lunch home with me.

The week began stressfully, since progress reports came out today. This is encouraging from the standpoint that I am now 1/8 finished with the year, but made things difficult since it required me to get caught up on the (shamefully large!) amount of work which I had been procrastinating. Piling this onto a completely new and more involved lesson planning process made for not a lot of sleep. I was making some progress on Monday and Tuesday, but then I woke up Wednesday morning feeling miserably ill. Sore throat, stomach pain, the works.

I went to school that day, teaching my classes while feeling like somebody had tried to clean out my throat with steel wool, and then stayed after school for two hours entering grades (I got it done, praise God!). I went home and went to sleep almost immediately, about 6:30 PM. I woke up at 2:00 this morning feeling even more miserable and literally unable to speak above a whisper due to the condition of my throat. I slept fitfully until about 5:00 , drinking nearly 4 liters of water in the interval (I filled and emptied my 2-liter bottle twice), and then decided that trying to teach classes in my condition would be futile. So, I called in sick, for the second time in 5 weeks.

Robin (the principal and the person I called) recommended that I go to the doctor and get checked for strep, which I did. The doctor took about 5 minutes to tell me that there were no signs of any infection, and what I had were allergies. He did not say "and allergies are no reason to miss another day of work this week, you limp-wristed puling weakling," but had he said it, I would have agreed. My chagrin, beginning then and still continuing at this moment, would be difficult to overstate.

Was I honest with myself when I decided I wasn't able to get through one more day, or did I seize on the first excuse to shirk my responsibilities and loaf all day? Can a man who spends over 10% of his working days (this is a mathematically correct figure so far) lying at home sipping water and watching boring daytime TV be trusted at all with a task as important as teaching children? Or, for that matter, with any task more involved than flipping burgers or digging ditches? My own weakness and incapacity, in which (following Paul's example) I ought to boast, instead have me kicking myself in the teeth and wishing anybody but me had recieved the call to do this job.

The doctor suggested a treatment which is working well so far, so that problem is near enough to being solved. I'd appreciate your prayers for an attitude adjustment, to allow me to quit emotionally self-mortifying and have faith that, whatever my shortcomings, they are not too big for God to handle. I need to recover that Psalm 27 attitude (see the last few paragraphs of this post), and start seeing the times when I fail as an opportunity for God's power to shine more obviously through me. Pray that this discouraging week, having already maimed my faith in my own abilities, will proceed now to increase my faith in and reliance on God's. Right now, my knee-jerk response to the whole thing is one of wounded pride. Sadly, it's only wounded; God, please finish it off! I don't want it in my life and neither do You.

There is a silver lining, however. How frustrated I am when not doing my job adequately has made me realize that I love it. I don't mean this in the sense that what I do is particularly enjoyable in itself, although it can be. Rather, I love my job because it causes the kind of passion evident in what I've written here.

If I missed a day of one of my other jobs, I generally thought of it in purely pragmatic terms; what were my coworkers going to think or say, how would it affect my standing with my bosses, was I in danger of being fired, etc. When I miss a day of this job, I am frustrated at the lost opportunity to pour more of myself into it, even though that might be a painful and debilitating process. There's a sense of purpose involved in doing what I'm doing that has been extremely rare in my life up until now, and has certainly never coincided with what I spent the majority of my time on. I love my job for beginning (or at least accelerating from its previous glacial pace) my transformation from a self-centered, indolent child into a man who might someday merit the greatest description to which a human being can aspire: servant.