So shall I plant sequoias
And revel in the soil
Of a crop I know I'll never live to reap?
Then sow my body to my Maker
And my heart unto my savior
And spread me on the road, the rocks, and the weeds.
John Mark McMillan, “The Road, The Rocks, and the Weeds”
I’ve written two blogs for Victorious Educators since I became a teacher. The first one was written in May of 2023, four months after I started my new career. It was bright-eyed, hopeful, and passionate, and it looked optimistically forward into the future. The second blog was written this last April near the end of my first full year of teaching. You can go back and read it if you want, but it essentially confessed that there were many days that year that I wanted to leave the profession altogether and would have if God had not kept me in it for some reason that He had yet to reveal to me. Sounds inspiring, doesn’t it?
Well, here we are for Part III of this trilogy, and my hope is that it falls somewhere between hopelessly naive and just plain old hopeless. God has graciously moved me to a new school in a new district with a team that I adore, and He’s given me a new perspective on what it means to be an educator. However, to go forward, I feel like I need to go back and finish the story I started back in April.
A Way Through the Desert
I left off last time with Moses at the burning bush, arguing with God about going to Pharaoh and demanding the Hebrew people’s freedom. If you’re unfamiliar with the rest of the story, allow me to summarize. Moses does end up going back to Egypt along with his brother Aaron, lays down God’s challenge to the most powerful ruler in the world, and essentially kickstarts one of the most devastating spiritual battles ever recorded. Spoiler alert: God wins. Moses then leads the Israelites into the desert where they enter into a covenant with Yahweh. He vows to be their God and to protect and prosper them inside the protective boundaries of His Torah (Law). They, in turn, vow to be His people and do everything He says.
Another spoiler alert: They don’t. What follows is 40 years of wandering around and around a wilderness that should have taken them less than two weeks to cross. The people grumble and complain and rebel and complain some more. All the while there is Moses, the guy who thought he wasn’t cut out for this kind of leadership, patiently (most of the time) guiding this rag-tag band toward relationship with their Creator and a new home.
I have walked through two seasons of my life that I would consider to be “wildernesses.” The first was after my Dad passed away. It lasted three years and very nearly cost me my life. The second one was the first year and a half of my teaching career. It wasn’t nearly as drastic, but it taught me the same lesson as the first. Intimacy with God is forged in the heat of the desert, not in the comfort of the shade tree. The times in my life when I was the most empty and desperate were also the times that Yahweh showed me just how much He loves me and how sufficient He is for all my needs. I have experienced manna and quail from heaven, water from a rock, and a fire and a cloud to guide me when I had no idea where I was going. I pray that if you are walking through your own wilderness right now that you experience God’s goodness in the dry and lonely places.
However, as beneficial as these hard seasons can be spiritually, if we are all really honest with ourselves, we desperately want them to come to an end as soon as possible. I know Moses did, and he got his wish, but maybe not quite the way he envisioned it.
A Dream Unrealized
In Deuteronomy we read Moses’s last sermon to the Israelites before they (finally) entered the Promised Land. He recounted God’s faithfulness to His people, reminded them of the Law they had sworn to follow (again), and warned them what will happen if they did not. As he closed his speech with a rousing challenge to choose life instead of death, we are confronted with one of the more disappointing and even frustrating stories in Scripture. Moses, after so many years of faithful service to God and His people, with all that he had to put up with, did not get to enter the “land flowing with milk and honey.”
Certainly God had his reasons (see Numbers 20 for more details) for why Moses could not go in with his people, and there is much to learn from Moses’s failure to trust God and Moses’ reliance on anger and force instead of gentleness and grace. However, the fact remains that Moses never got to see his life’s work come to fruition. He died and was buried in sight of his ultimate goal, but his feet never walked on that soil.
This is where the song lyrics from the beginning of the blog come in. These lines are from my favorite song by one of my favorite artists, and they acknowledge a very painful reality. Many of us are pouring ourselves out for people and purposes that we will never get to see fully realized. As educators, we daily invest our hearts and souls into kids whom we will never see again when they walk out the doors of our school for the last time. We strive, and we struggle, and we try to get them to care, but many of them simply do not. They hate our subject, they dislike school, and they prefer being on their phone or the field or the court than sitting there listening to us. They attend our class for nine months, and the ground of their heart and mind remains like concrete, no matter how many seeds we tried to plant.
So, is it worth it? Should we continue to waste our breath, our time, and our money on kids who don’t care? Even if we think they will become something someday, we will probably never know. As such, we are deprived of the gratification of a “job well done.” Should we, as the song asks, keep working in soil that will only ever be dirt as far as we know?
If we want to be like Jesus, our only answer must be, “Yes!”
Graves into Gardens
The last lines of the song above are, I think, a beautiful allusion to Jesus’s words in John 12:24. “Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.” Being a follower of Jesus doesn’t just mean reading your Bible and going to church and not doing bad things. It also means being willing to lovingly lay down your life for others, even if they never respond to your sacrifice the way you want them to. When we show up to school every day, we have to be ready to die to ourselves, get down in the dirt with our students, and let God do work beneath the surface of their hearts that will yield fruit that will last for generations. Sure, we may never get to see it, but we can have faith that God will multiply our sacrifice and help our little saplings grow into mighty sequoias.
Sometimes God is gracious and shows us the fruit of our labor. Sometimes that kid who made us crazy sends us a graduation invitation out of nowhere. Sometimes that high achiever ends up on the news for curing a disease or writing a bestseller. Sometimes that young lady who never seemed to be listening turns up as a student teacher and says that you inspired her to go into education. Sometimes, like me, you get to the end of a desert season in a difficult place and you get to walk into a new environment and breathe the fresh air of God’s faithfulness.
Either way, God is good, and He is in the dirt with us.
Want to read Michael’s previous blogs? Check them out here!
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