Why Teach?

 

I have about six students in grade two this year who are concerningly below grade level in reading and writing. So, my coworker and I signed up for an intensive intervention program that would combine reading and phonics instruction. It required extra training and honestly, extra work. But. The results have been truly amazing and heartwarming. Seeing the girl in the middle in the photo LIGHT UP as she discovers the joys of reading and writing is why I teach. To get to be part of that process is such a privilege.

Autumn

I am leaning into my favourite season of colours and pumpkins and novels and fireplaces and scarves and candles. Today is Nov 4 and there are still leaves on the trees and the sun was out. Yes, the world is raging all around. Yes, I have a cold. Yes, it's report card writing season. But. I can still find joy and I will.
 

Beauty-a reminder from a favourite writer

Beauty is a defiance of war. God made this world for health and loveliness, for communion and cultivation. Don't forget that amidst the headlines. Don't stop ordering your world or tending the souls around you or cooking them good food or planting flowers. Every one of those acts is a defiance of the evil we see raining fire and death upon innocent people. Don't lose faith in this time of despair with the square of earth you have been called to keep and the people who depend on your love.

It's so easy to suspend normal life in the face of relentless headlines. I have too often this week succumbed to the endless checking of my phone, to a disconnection with those around me, a sense that the thousand faithful acts of our ordinary are useless in the face of such destruction. But that is another arm of evil. Faithfulness is vital, it is our good work, our duty, our gift both to the God who made us to flourish and the suffering who yearn for comfort. We must keep faith so that safe and loving places still remain in the world. We must be ready to receive the war torn, to recognise the lost when they arrive on our doorstep. We must make our homes places of hospitality that are tethered to heaven, ready to feast and heal whomever God sends.

Evil disorders and disintegrates what God crafted with his own hands and called good. Evil unravels affection and history and safety and and hope. Evil breaks families apart and destroys narratives of love, and bombs the homes it took decades to build. But love rebuilds. Love defies evil by doing what God did in the very beginning of our story; speaking the world alive, calling it forth to ripening life, filling it with beauty, naming it with love.

That work is still possible, is the one thing necessary in the face of war. It's being done by those right in the thick of war; feeding the displaced children and sheltering the refugees and binding the wounds of those who have been bombed. We must give to that, pray for it from afar. But we may also participate in it by keeping faith. By claiming and cultivating spaces that are opposite to war, defiant of evil, allowing Beauty to be at work in us to claim and renew this broken world.