What Happened on Friday

Something unusual happened in one of my Spanish classes last Friday. This is a third-year Spanish class, one designed for heritage speakers - those kids whose parents speak Spanish at home, but who mostly grew up in the United States and thus have all their literacy training in English. They know Spanish vocabulary and can have a conversation in Spanish, but they haven't had much Language Arts training in Spanish.

Since day one of this school year, this class just hasn't clicked. An enthusiastic and productive atmosphere has been a struggle. They come in and just sit in their seats; they seem tired and listless most of the time; if I ask them to discuss a concept with a partner, they resist, not daring to open up and share any analyses or insights; some of them won't even discuss simple opinions, such as favorite foods. There are a few very chatty sophomore girls, and a few senior boys who are the complete opposite. These boys like to work (or sometimes, not work) on their own, and come with stoic faces, defensive or indifferent body language, and a silence that works as a kind of opposite downside to the girls' shrill sophomore laughter and constant gossip. (It's not that the males don't gossip -- if you get them going, they gossip quite a lot. But again, that's IF you get them going.)

The interesting thing is that I had many of these students last year, and last year the class atmosphere was positive. It felt like a close-knit group. I don't know if it's that more of them have senioritis this year, or if adding thirteen new kids to what was a class of twenty has changed the chemistry, or if the combination of personalities simply isn't working out. Based on their reactions to me and the way they talk to me, I am fairly certain that I have a good relationship with most of them, but they don't seem comfortable with each other. Some of them don't get along outside the classroom, but being what they call a "snitch" is the worst insult possible for many of them, so even if they have good reason to tell an adult, most of them won't.

All that to say... the classroom got so dull at one point that I realized these kids were going to need a lot more icebreaker and energizer activities: things to help them get to know each other, to trust each other more, at least within the classroom, and things to increase their energy levels at the start of class time. Otherwise, every class period was going to feel like an hour and thirty-five minutes of book work, even when it wasn't.

I decided to do an icebreaker on Friday: a game where you write a description of someone and others have to guess, and then you have to describe that person in one word while others guess, and then do an action to represent that person while others guess. High school kids like pretty much anything that revolves around them, especially if there's a social element, so I thought they would enjoy it. I had each kid write his or her name on a 3x5 card, and then I collected and redistributed them and told them that they needed to write a one-sentence description of that person ("and be nice, or I'm not going to read yours," I added).

So they did, and I gathered the cards once again, and looked through the descriptions. There were a few that included distinguishing features of their classmates, but for the most part, the descriptions were way too general: "This person is very nice and intelligent." "This person is athletic." "You're really nice and I like your long dark hair [not exactly an outstanding feature in a room with twenty Hispanic girls]." One person just wrote "He's a cutie," about one of the senior boys.

After I read a few to myself, I teased my students a bit: "Maybe we need to have a class on writing descriptions? These are really general." I said. "Let's just try it and see how it goes."

I actually thought it might be a good, teachable moment. I wanted them to see how little information a vague description actually gives, so I was going to read four or five and have them rewrite them after seeing how difficult they were to guess.

But then, something curious happened. As I read these vague descriptions, I started to see faces light up.

"This person is very intelligent," I read from the card. All the the kids started looking around the room and naming off the high achievers in the room. Even if the card wasn't describing them, those kids looked pleased that someone guessed their name, that someone thought they were intelligent. And when they landed on the actual object of the description - "Yep, it's L.," I would answer - that student would blush. "Aw, thanks guys," some of them started saying.

Again, the compliments varied, though some only slightly: "Very pretty and very kind"; "You're a really good friend;" even one that said, "You're super smart and your eyebrows are on point." (All of it was in Spanish, of course.) As I read these compliments out loud, more and more kids were smiling, and the body language relaxed: kids were sitting up straighter and uncrossing their arms, looking at each other and responding to each other rather than staring into space or looking at me. I thought it might be a good idea to give every single kid a compliment, but I didn't want it to get old, so I asked the kids if they were bored and we should move on, or if we should read through all them. "Let's read all of them!" was unanimous.

I know that some of the kids may have wanted to go through all the compliments simply to avoid any actual work or mental effort. But based on the changed atmosphere in the room, I think there was more going on. In every class, you have kids who come from homes or situations where they may not have had anything positive said to them that day - maybe even that week. Even the kids who come from highly supportive and encouraging families have to deal with the shallow, hyper-critical, self-centered world of high school students who usually don't give compliments except to close friends. Even between friends, put-downs are considered a form of humor and entitled complaining is a common way to bond. For most people, high school is rough, or at least has many rough days. And it felt like magic to see the kids light up as their classmates encouraged them and pointed out the positive.

So, I read all of them. And in the space of ten minutes, every single kid in my classroom got an affirmation from a classmate. The kids, though their descriptive skills were lacking (and they later realized they had kind of missed the point when they had trouble guessing someone), wrote very kind and encouraging words, and I was pleased that they had all taken seriously my charge to not be hurtful toward anyone.

Moments like these are not, I would say, the norm of teaching, at least on a daily basis. But what happened on Friday was one of those magic moments that makes teaching the best job.

On Watching Honey, I Shrunk the Kids without You

I watched the movie Honey, I Shrunk the Kids with my daughters a couple weeks ago. I was pretty excited when it appeared on Netflix, because it was one of my favorite movies when I was a kid. The girls liked the movie and I was pleasantly surprised that it was just as fun to watch as an adult as it had been to watch as a kid. (Sometimes when you are an adult, the movies you loved as child fall flat when you re-watch them with your own children.) While I enjoyed watching the movie, in a way it made me sad. It reminded me of my brother Joe.

When we were kids, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids was one of the movies we used to watch often. We had many of the lines memorized, and Joe had a special talent for not only memorizing entire scenes from movies, but also doing really good impressions of the characters. He did this often, and one summer we combined our talents with our chores.

We had a vegetable garden, and in the summer when the green beans were growing like crazy, one of our chores was to go out, following the vines which grew over almost the entire back of the chain-length fence in the backyard, and pick the green beans that were ripe. One of the things that Joe and I did when we picked green beans was quote lines from movies to entertain ourselves. And Honey, I Shrunk the Kids was a movie where we had entire scenes memorized. So when I was watching the film with my girls, many lines brought back a flood of memories, not just of the line and how funny we thought it was as kids, but also of my brother's voice quoting the line and imitating every character's voice and intonation, of sunny days in our backyard in the Arizona desert, of chores we did as kids and the things we would do for fun. I loved the memories, and it hurt a little when I remembered that I had nobody to share them with.

What I wanted to do after I watched the movie was call or text Joe, and reminisce about how much fun we had quoting movies and picking green beans together when we were kids (even though at the time it wasn't fun, because it was, after all, doing chores). I wanted to quote some of the lines that we thought were the funniest and talk about how it was a movie that hadn't lost its charm, at least to me, over the years.

After Joe died, one of my friends was telling me that she had heard the idea that every relationship we have with others forms part of our identity. The experiences and relationships we have with people are relationships that we do not share aspects of with everyone, so when someone dies, a part of you dies too, because you don't have that particular relationship with anyone else in your life. This made a lot of sense to me. I think it explains some of the loneliness that comes with death. I remember when Joe died that what I wanted more than anything was to be with my parents and youngest brother, and yet even while their presence comforted me, I still felt so lonely. I think that loneliness was me saying goodbye to Joe and missing him, but I think I was also facing the reality that part of me, our shared history and relationship, was now gone from the land of the living.

So I guess the point of this post is just to say that I miss Joe, and I miss the fun we had together. And maybe the point is also the realization that this movie now has a special place in my heart, because when I watch it, it's more than entertainment. When I watch it, I feel like it's giving me back a little piece of my brother and our childhood when we were best friends and used to quote movies together for fun.

Reflections After a Death

My brother died, and one thing I have always relied on for comfort is the Bible. In Psalms it says the LORD is close to the brokenhearted, and saves those who are crushed in spirit. How? I wondered. How do you feel Him when he is not physically present? And how does He save us when our spirits are crushed by grief?

There are so many questions in the midst of a tragedy. I wonder why God lets it happen. Does He love me? Does it mean someone has done something wrong? Are we being punished? Are things out of His control? Does He care about me? How could something so terrible possibly be good? Is He good?

These are all questions that I know, cognitively, the correct answers to. So I think my deep underlying question is more transcendent. Death shows me that I am not in control of almost anything, and my looking for answers is really looking for affirmation that life is not ultimately about me, about humanity; my looking for answers is really looking for hope in something greater. 

We know that we all die in the end, and if life centers around humanity and we all end up cold, silent, empty, separated from each other, then we can feel only despair. When we experience a death, we experience that cold, silent, lifeless separation. We miss the person; we grieve their absence and the end of their potential. So I turn to God and I start asking Him my questions, and I feel sadness and anger. Death is the Great Enemy, and it comes for all of us. The only hope we have in the end is to be rescued from this Great Enemy. And all my hope and the answers to my underlying questions, I found in Jesus, in a story about Him in John 11. In John 11, there is the story of some of Jesus’s friends: a family who lost somebody.

John 11 starts out: ”Now a certain man was ill, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha.... So the sisters sent to Him, saying, 'Lord, he whom you love is ill.’” They recognized that Jesus is God’s Son, so they thought to ask Him for help. “But when Jesus heard it He said, 'This illness does not lead to death. It is for the glory of God, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it.'

"Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. So, when He heard that Lazarus was ill, He stayed two days longer in the place where He was."

The first time I really thought about this verse, I felt almost sick to my stomach, because it is terrifying. The part that stuck out to me is where it says “Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. So… He stayed two days longer.” This is scary because it contradicts everything we think in our American Christianity, that if Jesus loves us and we belong to Him, nothing bad will happen to us. Intellectually we know this isn't true, but it's so easy to believe that good things are evidence of His love and favor and bad things are evidence of abandonment. But that explanation is simplistic and not true. It is not that Jesus doesn't care about Martha and Mary and Lazarus. It is because He loves them that He doesn't come right away. He is in control; He could have come and stopped death, but He didn't. God could have prevented Joe's death, but He loves me, and He loves Joe, and He loves my parents and Brian and our other relatives, and so... He didn't. This shows me that there must be a greater good beyond the tragedy.

I think sometimes we think that maybe Jesus loves us, but He doesn't quite have as much power as we'd thought over bad things. But we know that Jesus's decision to wait to go to Lazarus was intentional. After Jesus stayed for two days, "he said to the disciples, 'Let us go to Judea again.' The disciples said to Him, 'Rabbi, the Jews were just now seeking to stone you, and are you going there again?' Jesus answered, 'Are there not twelve hours in the day? If anyone walks in the day, he does not stumble, because he sees the light of this world. But if anyone walks in the night, he stumbles, because the light is not in him.'" (vv. 7-11)

These verses are metaphorical. Throughout the first half of John, Jesus refers to the fact that His hour has not yet come... that is, it is still His appointed "day time" to work and accomplish His purpose. And then later on in John, Jesus talks about how His hour is at hand; that is, it is time for Him to accomplish His ultimate purpose, which was dying. Jesus has no fear of the religious leaders in Judea because He knows that His Father is in control of every single little detail and every bit of timing. I find this comforting as well, knowing that God is sovereign over every single little detail of our lives. Regardless of our own purposes, God knew, from birth, how long Joe's life would be. He knew every choice Joe would make; He knew what Joe's strengths and weaknesses would be; and He knew exactly the best time to bring him home.

And yet, even knowing that God has a good purpose, is in control, and loves us, we still need a hope for beyond death. If death is our Great Enemy, and it comes for everyone, then how could we have hope? When Jesus gets to Bethany, you can hear the same doubt and a slight accusation of abandonment when He meets the sisters. Verse 17 begins, "Now when Jesus came, he found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb four days.... [W]hen Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went and met Him, but Mary remained seated in the house. Martha said to Jesus, 'Lord, if You had been here, my brother would not have died.'" This was my feeling at first, the first few days. It’s a question that is also a slight accusation: How could You let this happen? I was the feeling the same way Martha was: I know You are all powerful, so where were You? 

Martha needs a resolution, and even in her doubt she expresses hope, saying, "'But even now I know that whatever you ask from God, God will give you.’ Jesus said to her, 'Your brother will rise again.' Martha said to Him, 'I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.' Jesus said to her, 'I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in Me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die.'" This is what we need. We need hope for the future; we need to know that more awaits us than silent, cold, abandonment. It hurts to lose someone you love; it hurts to think that one day your life, your potential, will come to an end. So I have taken great comfort in knowing that Jesus has overcome death, our Great Enemy; that our physical deaths are not the end, that instead of our lives ending in cold, still, silence, we are transitioning to a celebration, eternally fulfilled and in the presence of the One who died for us.

God has used this passage over the last two weeks to answer my questions gently. I know that He loves me, that bad things happen in spite of and even because of His love for me; I know that He has everything planned perfectly in His sovereignty; I know that death is not truly the end for anyone, because He is the resurrection and the life, and anyone who hopes in Him, "though he die, yet shall he live." And later in the story, Jesus goes on to show He has power over death by raising Lazarus from the dead. 

And there is one more question that hurts, and that is simply the matter of dealing with how much it hurts and feeling abandoned. Has God left me alone in my pain? This is the most painful part of the "Why?" question. It is easy to know cognitively that God loves me (cause He's God, so that's what He does), and yet still feel as if He is far-off, distant, and is so aware of His own good purposes, that He forgets how much we can hurt while we are still living on this broken earth. So that is the last comfort I find from John 11.

Verse 28 begins, “[Martha] went and called her sister Mary, saying in private, 'The Teacher is here and is calling for you.' And when she heard it, she rose quickly and went to Him.... Now when Mary came to where Jesus was and saw Him, she fell at His feet, saying to Him, 'Lord, if You had been here, my brother would not have died.' When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come with her also weeping, He was deeply moved in His spirit and greatly troubled." Jesus feels compassion for the people; His knowledge that He is going to raise Lazarus from the dead shortly thereafter does not make Him distant and unsympathetic. He cares when we are hurting; Jesus knows that God's original design for the world was good, that things are not supposed to be this way, that sin has wreaked havoc on our physical beings, on our inner selves, on our relationships with others, and on our relationship with Him. The Greek words for "deeply moved" and "deeply troubled" denote that Jesus was indignant and angry, agitated and disquieted in His spirit. He knows this is how things are not supposed to be, and when we are so hurt, He feels the same restlessness in His soul that we feel in great grief. 

Verses 34 and 35 say, “And He said, 'Where have you laid him?' They said to Him, 'Lord, come and see.' Jesus wept." These verses reminded me that I am not alone. The most comforting thing in this time has been the people who are with us, who call and text and visit and show us by their presence and food and flowers, that we are not alone. And when I go home at night and everyone is asleep and I have to face my sadness and loss alone, this verse reminds me that I am not truly alone. Jesus weeps with me. What I need more than answers is Himself and His presence. He sees sin and knows how it hurts us and how life was not meant to be this way, and He uses a tragedy like this and all my questions and doubts to give me what I ultimately want and need, which is Him.

After Joe died, I felt empty and alone the first few days; I honestly wondered where Jesus was. I kept reminding myself that Jesus wept. One night, He brought to mind verse 5: "Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. So, when He heard that Lazarus was ill, He stayed two days longer in the place where He was." And then I cried, because I realized that even if it seemed like He was staying away right then, He was actually near me, and knew what was going on, and had a purpose for my family's pain. Jesus stayed away from Mary, Martha, and Lazarus, because He knew that a death would allow them to know Him better. Although Joe had his struggles, he never abandoned his faith, and so I believe that Joe’s death has ultimately allowed him to know Jesus better than any of us who are still on earth. I loved Joe very much, and since Joe died, Jesus has been with me, and I have seen more of His character, and it is good. My life, Joe's life, anyone's life, is ultimately about Him, and He is our hope.

The Man, Jesus

I was thinking the other day about how I rarely think about Jesus as a human. Since my childhood faith, Jesus has been a historical figure of mythical proportions, someone who has always been and lives as The Savior in some strange spiritual realm. But do I ever think about Him as a man?

Mentally I affirm my Christian beliefs, that Jesus of Nazareth, an actual person, was both completely God and completely human. Every once in a while I realize how crazy this sounds, and so I sit there trying to figure out whether I am the intellectual equivalent of a sane person who truly believes in the tooth fairy. However, most of the time I do believe this.

But I also don't think about Him as an actual breathing person. Even now, writing His name, I am thinking of His spirit and His personhood in the Trinity, but to picture Him as someone who, on the surface, was so ordinary that Isaiah said there would be nothing to attract us to Him, I can't think of Him as a man.

I look around me and I see men. Some are tall, some are short; they are fat and thin, fair and dark, muscular and flabby, down-to-earth and erudite. I believe that Jesus existed from eternity, and yet at some point in the history of the earth, while continuing to be God, He voluntarily put aside some of His divine characteristics to take on the dust-based flesh of creatures that He formed and breathed life into a long, long time ago.

He was a real infant. He was born in a tiny body, without the ability to keep His head from flopping over, without the ability to see clearly more than a couple feet beyond His face, without the ability to consciously use His fingers to grasp something He wanted. Utter helplessness. His parents had to flee their country just to keep Him from being killed by Herod (Matthew 2:13).

Jesus is His name in Greek, and that His name in Aramaic would have been Yeshua (where we get our modern Joshua), a much more common name. It would be like if the Messiah were American and born in the States with a name like Mike or Chris. A completely ordinary name, with nothing special, at least on the surface, to clue someone in to the idea that this Mike or Chris is actually God Himself.

Because I am a Christian, I believe that Jesus never sinned. But does that mean Mary and Joseph never reprimanded Him? Sometimes kids have to be reprimanded simply because they are children and are ignorant and foolish. So did Jesus have to be disciplined because, at four years old, maybe He asked a rude question at a solemn social function? I just wonder. He was actually a kid.

And if He was a human, that meant He probably thought about sex. He wouldn't have sinned in thinking about it, again, because the Bible says that He "knew no sin" (2 Corinthians 5:21) But He had hormones (I'm thinking of you, testosterone), and pheromones, and He would have been adolescent at one point, and actual blood flowing in actual veins. I am not trying to be vulgar or write things just for shock value. I am trying to begin to grasp the idea that my Savior is a real human.

He had a brain. He thought and felt via firing neurons. I do believe that God feels emotions, yet is perfectly in control of them and they are right and justified every time. So when God the Son was in a human body, did He ever struggle with feelings? Maybe at some point His blood sugar was low, and His perfect soul was battling with the chemicals and neurons in His earthly brain, staving off unrighteous sadness or irritation. And the fact that Jesus was perfect and occasionally sad or irritated means that those emotions are not, in themselves, wrong.

Hebrews says that Jesus "in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin." (4:15) In every respect? Do I actual believe that Jesus can relate to the temptation to disobey God, or feel pride, or lust, or gossip about someone, or to wallow in anger; and what's more, do I not only believe that He can relate to those feelings but also never once sinned by giving in to those desires?

I was thinking about these facets of Jesus being human, and I pictured myself in front of the actual historical Jesus of Nazareth: someone who wasn't attractive, wasn't the fair, solemn, white man portrayed in old church portraits. He was probably not tall, bearded, dark rather than fair, plain, and essentially poor and homeless during His earthly ministry (at one point, He tells a potential follower that He has "nowhere to lay His head"). He was so clearly human that his disciples were terrified and surprised when He calmed the wind and waves, and John the Baptist tells the crowd that someone among them is the Messiah, and there is no indication that the crowd around Jesus has any idea who John is talking about.

I was reflecting on His humanity, and picturing myself prostrate before a Jewish man, and felt a sense of wrongness, of idolatry. And to fall down and worship any other person would be idolatry. Yet to cast myself at the feet of Jesus son of Joseph, of Nazareth, is to cast myself at the flesh-and-blood feet of God Almighty.

So anyway, that's all for today. It's still weird to me. If anyone else has any thoughts on this, I'd love to hear them.

This Guy

This is my husband, Ian Bullard. We've been married for nine and a half years now, and this month is his birthday. I was thinking the other day about how much I appreciate him. But the thing about Ian is that a lot of the things I appreciate about him are under the surface. I mean, obviously he's smart and good-looking, right? He loves God and he loves his family, and is organizationally-skilled and musically talented. But I think these things are apparent. And in honor of his birthday this month, I wanted to talk about his traits that not everyone knows that make me respect him so much.

(As a side note, I know that one difficulty with blogs and social media in general is that they tend to convey only the highlights of people's lives, making them seem unrealistically ideal. My intention today is not to seem unrealistically ideal, but to celebrate the positive things about my husband that, in all honesty, I forget about or overlook or take for granted many days.)

To start with: Ian is competent. This is the main reason why I married him. Meeting guys my age, back when I was twenty-one and twenty-two, made me realize that there were many people out there who did not care about or were not able to do things well. He is a hard worker and a good worker. When he has a job to do, he does it to a high standard. It doesn't matter whether it's filling in for higher management in a high-stress meeting or washing the dishes. I think that hard work and a commitment to excellence are easy traits to overlook, because people just expect that jobs will be done right, and only notice when they aren't. If Ian is going to do something, he knows that it's worth putting in the time and effort to do it well. If he's not good at doing something, he usually has the honesty and humility to acknowledge that someone else could do it better, and he defers to their skills.

Next: Ian really cares about people. I mean he truly, deeply cares about other people and their eternal souls. He was a pastor for a long time, and I've been part of the church world long enough to know that sometimes, whether they know it or not, pastors begin to care about people only because it's their job.

Everyone thinks that I'm the caring one in the relationship, because I'm usually gentle when I speak and I don't like to offend people. Ian is more abrasive. He often says exactly what he's thinking, which isn't always flattering, and his jokes are sometimes borderline offensive. The impression we give is that I'm the nice one.

But Ian has a depth of caring that many people don't realize exists until they get to know him well. Ian is willing to expend much more of his energy into the lives of others, maintaining both close and long-distance relationships in different ways. I tend to be much more protective of my personal time and space, and I am terrible at maintaining long-distance relationships. But if someone has a need, Ian wants to fill it. If someone needs a friend, no matter how awkward or annoying they may seem to others, Ian wants to be there for them. Ian is really good at seeing those around him as important to God, and therefore they are important to him.

I remember learning in a college class that although people with disabilities are gaining increasing acceptance in society in many ways, it is still very rare for someone with a moderate to severe disability to have typically-developed friends. Ian is the first person I ever knew who was friends with people with intellectual disabilities and Down's syndrome. He never seemed to think it was weird or awkward or an obstacle, and there was never any sense of pity in the relationship. He just accepted them as another human being and wanted to hang out with them.

So, while I'm less likely to say something that offends you, Ian is a lot more likely to reach out to you and want to invest in your life, regardless of how well he knows you or how much time you've spent together in the past.

And the biggest thing: Ian has taught me a lot about God's love for me over our years together, because loving me is something that he expresses every day. He forgives quickly and never holds a grudge. He accepts my faults as well as my strengths, and even when I annoy him, I know that his love for me is unconditional, because he made a vow to God and to me nine and a half years ago, and Ian does not break his vows. I am always expecting people to give up on me once they learn about all my flaws, and Ian has come to know my flaws better than anyone else (and has to put up with them every day!), and yet he still actively loves me.

So, thank you, Ian Bullard, for being a better husband than I deserve. To be completely honest, you are not the kind of person I always grew up thinking I would marry. But it turns out that God knew better than I did what I would need in a spouse.

I love you.