We Need Him Every Day

The title of this article carries with it a simple message that was kneaded into the dough of my soul this past Friday. I’m sure I could’ve preached a sermon or two about it before this episode, but an experience of it is worth much more to me than a sermon, memories and tears so much more than maxims and syllogisms. For you, my reader, who must take it in second-hand, I pray God gives you some measure of what I have tasted and seen.

IN THE MIDDLE OF THIRD PERIOD, while my kids were taking a test and I was doing the rounds, a student raised his hand to ask for a sharpened pencil—a common request from those who are about to be caught with no classwork done. I padded my right side. Nothing but my keys. I reached into my rarely used left pocket and found a pencil, which I removed quickly, pulling along with it a few shredded Kleenexes, once wet with tears but become crusty. A potent thought popped up. I handed the student the pencil and continued my rounds, fingering the Kleenexes. They reminded me of something that I thought I ought to write down. From the podium I grabbed the clipboard on which I’d been keeping a rough record of my students’ behavior throughout the day. In the middle of the top sheet was a prayer, or maybe a note-to-self: “My God, my God, your mercy is so great.” (When did I write that? It must have been during first period.) I recorded the left-pocket discovery just below it, and then threw the Kleenexes away discreetly. Why jot down this event? Why bother continuing to recall this morning’s tears when I could just destroy the evidence of them and move on?

Because these had been the tears of God.

EARLIER THAT MORNING, when I entered the copy room, I encountered one of my colleagues whom I would often find in this very place before school. Despite efforts to appear ready to tackle the day, she could tell that I had been crying.

“Oh! What’s wrong?” she asked feelingly.

I told her that I had been crying all morning, but that my tears were a good thing. “I don’t know if you’re a believer or not, but God speaks, and when he speaks it can be hard to hear.” After a moment I added, “The tears are a good thing, this morning.”

She nodded silently. Not a believer. We went about our business.

EARLIER THAT MORNING, I stood in my kitchen dressed for work. It must have been just before 06:00. I slowly poured coffee into my travel mug. In the dimness, it looked like ink. The half-and-half, next, softly trickled in, forming at first little storm-clouds against the blackness. They billowed and grew. Eventually these clouds overcame the whole sky in the mug, even the unseen realms behind the sky, and transformed the little world in there from night to day.

Suddenly, after the coffee whitened, a prayer escaped the trap of my fleshly mind: “God, if you don’t give me grace today, I won’t make it.”

By the time I had the lid on the mug, I was crying. So little time had elapsed. I had not spilled my coffee. I had not remembered some past frustration. I had not thought ahead to a dreadful future.

These were the tears of God.

I cried because God spoke.

To tell the story well and rightly, I should not yet put what he said into quotation marks, because I didn’t sort it out or force an articulation of it until later. In short, he impressed upon me my weakness and foolishness for such a prayer. “God, if you don’t give me grace today, I won’t make it.”

Weakness. My flesh raged at this. The first tears were hot and angry, aware of my inadequacies, waiting at the edge of my eyelid and threatening to announce my failures to the world. I couldn’t make it on my own, not even for one day, a Friday.

Foolishness. My spirit broke at this. Those first tears were pushed off the edge into the oblivion on my cheeks, followed now by genuine, liquid sadness. Of course I couldn’t make it without him! Fool!

These first words from God and the corresponding tears threw me into darkness. And then, just as suddenly, a drop of cream. A new word poured into me, forming at first little storm-clouds against the blackness. They billowed and grew. They mushroomed until all of me was changed, homogeneously tainted by grace as coffee is whitened by cream.

This is the picture of revelation.

These were the tears of God.

Beatitude. My spirit revived. The rest of my tears spoke of mixed gratitude and pleasure. Not a day goes by that his grace isn’t here with me; every day that I “make it” is a day that he has made.

Eventually my housemate noticed me in this state. He had been waiting on me for a ride to school. He tried to comfort me, and then the whole matter burst out of me in a few words: “We need him every day.” He agreed. We shared this thought for the next thirty minutes on our way to school. I cried the whole way there and tried to sop up my tears with those Kleenexes. He prayed before we  went into school to make copies. And I knew without a doubt that these were the tears of God.

Jesus Christ said, “I am the vine, ye are the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye can do nothing” (John 15.5).

Cross-country sans Shoes

Today I helped one of the TFA teachers at my school (also a first-year teacher here) get her cross-country runners to a meet in Itta Bena. She invited me along to take splits at the mile marker, under the assumption that this meet would be run like the ones she was used to in Minnesota (her home State). In those meets, runners have numbers pinned to their shirts. In those meets, there is a mile marker. Alas, this was not what we found there. Because we did not know the course well, my job changed from split-timer to cheerleader. I just jogged out to the middle of the course to encourage the runners as they went. While I was there, I also decided to shout nonsense about breathing and posture, but this was not part of my official job description. It was a good time. I got to see some of my own students outside of class, and enjoyed every minute of not wearing a tie in their presence. After the meet we did another run to get the kids some training on the soft surface, which is lacking in Indianola, and I ran about four miles with some of the top boys. (I hadn’t run in weeks before this, and I’m amazed that I did so well, even ending with a sprint-race against them.)

What inspired me to report on this incident is connected to the detail that makes it one of those adventures quintessentially “Mississippi”:

I woke up from a nap this afternoon with a throbbing itching between two of my toes and on the top of my foot. I must’ve run through some poison sumac, or some such nastiness.—“But Philip,” my reader might say, “surely you were wearing running shoes as you jogged out.”—Yes, dear reader, I did go in running shoes, but I was not wearing them when I jogged on to the course. Instead I was wearing some black and pink flip-flops.—“Your flip-flops?”—No.—“Whose flip-flops?”—I had to give my shoes to one of the girls who did not have sneakers. Another girl was kind enough to offer me her flip-flops for the day, because I did not foresee the need to bring my own.

It became clear that a good number of our students—on the cross-country team—do not have sneakers! Some of them have basketball shoes, some have sprinting spikes made for running on a track, and some of them have slip-on Converse® knock-offs. Some of them do not have a shoe at all suitable for running. Only a few of them have sneakers. (No wonder almost all of them get shin-splints!)

I was shocked, but only for that brief moment when I was offering up my sneakers. Immediately after, I remembered that I am in the Mississippi Delta.

One of the big projects of the assistant coach, the TFA teacher who invited me, is to get donations of shoes from her contacts in the North. She has a box of a few dozen sneakers coming down for the kids this week, hopefully in time for the meet next Saturday. Her work with this team, in areas such as this, has been tremendous so far. She currently serves as the assistant coach under one of the other staff members at the school, who gets paid as the head coach but does nothing except drive a bus. This other individual does not run, does not know how to teach running, does not communicate with the assistant coach, and does not care about the budget-less cross-country team in the end. A sad state.

Regardless, the assistant coach is making huge strides (pun!), and in her dedication has become a model for my own pursuits with students. She already made me promise that I would come on as an assistant coach next year. I look forward to volunteering more with the cross-country team, even if it means I run through poison sumac for fun on a Saturday morning.

I love working here.