It’s mid-September now. We are about a month into the new school year, and I just now finally feel like I’m settling in. Whewww. Finally.
“This is not my first rodeo teaching… why can I not get settled into the new routines and schedules?” This has been on repeat in my mind for weeks now. If you know me well, you know I’m a routine girlie down to the minute in every part of every day! I like consistency. I like routine. It’s what works for me.
But it was just this past week that I looked around my classroom at my new group of students and thought to myself, “How lucky am I that I get to come here every day and do THIS?”
That thought really stayed with me throughout that day and several days after. I couldn’t help but think about how these are just kids learning to be kids for the first time—but they get to do it here, in my classroom, with me. What a privilege. What a rewarding job!
As educators, we aren’t only teaching curriculum, how to read, or how to spell words. We are teaching them so much more. We are teaching them how to be kind, how to persevere when it’s not coming easy, how to try again, how to believe in themselves, and how to navigate the world around them.
And while I may be the teacher standing in the front of the room each day, they are also teaching me more things than they will ever realize.
One thing they continue to teach me is that it’s okay that I don’t feel like I have it all together every day. They don’t think any less of me on those days, because they don’t know that I’m feeling that way. They simply see someone who shows up for them each day. Just as Jesus is always there showing up for us.
2 Corinthians 12:9 says, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is perfected in weakness. Therefore, I will most gladly boast all the more about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may reside in me.”
He doesn’t ask us to have everything perfectly together before He loves us. His grace is sufficient even on the days when we feel unsettled, overwhelmed, or like we aren’t enough. Where we are weak, He is strong. Where we feel like we are lacking, He is sufficient.
Maybe I’ve been so focused on trying to get “settled” that I forgot I was never expected to have it all figured out anyway.
Psalm 46:10 says, “Be still, and know that I am God.”
Just breathe. Maybe settling in doesn’t always mean having every routine perfectly in place. Maybe sometimes it means slowing down long enough to recognize that God has already placed me exactly where I’m supposed to be. In a classroom full of little people who are learning and growing, He is teaching me, too.
What a gift it is to teach them—and what a gift it is that, in the process, they are teaching me. They are showing me little glimpse of the Lord’s grace and mercy, and that even on the days we don’t have it all together — it’s a-okay!
Colossians 3:23 says, “Whatever you do, do it enthusiastically, as something done for the Lord and not for men, knowing that you will receive the reward of an inheritance from the Lord. You serve the Lord Christ.”
Wake up each day, and serve the Lord with gladness. Do it whether you are settled or not. The Lord knows our heart and we are exactly where we are supposed to be and doing exactly what we are supposed to be doing.
Rays of Sunshine inc 