real life: lesson 3

Hi friends :) Happy New Year! 

It's been a while (as per usual) but I felt a particularly strong urge to blog this morning. Maybe because I only have one day of break left and I feel like I haven't done anything productive...shh.

Last time I checked in, I was just starting my student teaching. And while some days definitely felt like they would never end, the whole semester went by faster than I could say "ANATOMY IS A REAL SCIENCE" (which is apparently NOT the case, according to the School District of Philadelphia...but that's a story for another time). Like most things, the highs are high and the lows are low, but as long as you're not alone, even the lowest of lows is weather-able. Reflecting on these experiences brings me to my real life lesson #3:

Believing is more than a state of being. 

Even if we don't claim a religious faith, I think all of us choose to believe in something. Whether it's believing in your own abilities or the systems in place around you or in the absence of anything worth believing, there's something that we would place our bets on. For a long time, I thought that having faith in something was a one-time, done-deal type of situation. If I believe that NJ traffic is the worst, then I don't have to keep reminding myself of that everyday...do I? 

I've found, through my super-official research, that for some of the more important things in life, my faith in these things can't be passive. I can't just tell my students that I have faith in their ability to succeed in my class and expect those words alone to carry them through. The act of believing includes the long, hair-pulling hours of lesson planning, the painstakingly slow building of relationships, the desperate prayers for inspiration. Without the work, believing means close to nothing. 

The same thing applies to spiritual experiences. I have long since claimed to believe in God, but in the mess of my life this year, I can only honestly hold on to those words. I've taken for granted the work it takes to maintain my faith in God, trying to convince myself that "I can still be a follower of Christ without really...following him." Even saying that sounds bizarre, but that's pretty much what I'm doing. And in doing so, I've pushed my spiritual self to the point of systems failure, equivalent to me walking into my classroom on January 2nd with absolutely nothing prepared for the 90 minute block. A true nightmare. 

As it happens, 2019 will be equally if not more unforgiving than 2018. This will be the year that I graduate for the last time (maybe), enter the workforce for realsies, get married, and possibly move somewhere completely new. In the midst of the (controlled) chaos, fixing my spiritual self seems like a lost cause. But I think the beauty of who God is, is that even if I'm hanging on by a literally thread of nominal faith, He's still holding the other end. And unlike me, His Word is not just empty promises. His Word came to earth and did the work so that I wouldn't have to. But He didn't save me so that I could believe without doing anything about it. 

And so here's to 2019, may it not wreck us as we continue the only way we know how: forward.

Cheers, friends, see you in the new year :)
~M