For those who don't know Spanish, the title means God is teaching me to be humble.
My whole experience thus far in Honduras has been nothing short of life changing. I don't think I will ever NOT take an important lesson or truth from Christ everyday that I am here. Lately, humility has been a huge thing God has been working on in my heart.
I usually tend to be one of those people who has to have the last word and who gets super defensive if someone tells me I'm wrong. As I've been taking Spanish lessons these last few weeks, I've also learned that I don't like to NOT understand what I'm doing. If there is a word or concept I don't understand, I just hang my head and tell my teacher "I just can't do it! I don't get it!" I think it's even more frustrating here because ALL I want is to be able to converse with the native people in their own language. I enjoy talking to people, yet here, I am forced to be a little anti social because I literally do not know what to say. It's been good, however, to understand a bit of the frustration my own students must have in learning English.
I don't want to tell you that I've gotten to being a "pro" at being humble, but God has definitely raised my awareness of the importance of having this quality. Part of being humble, for me anyway, is to care more about others' needs around me more than my own. As I've been grading work from my students, some of their work required answers that dig into their personal lives. I've gotten to know my kids a lot just by reading their responses. There is a lot of pain they each deal with, and sometimes I forget that. On top of that, some of them opened up about how they feel about me as a teacher. At the beginning of the year, their answers would have hurt my feelings, but now it just shows me that we BOTH have some work to do. Looking back, I haven't always shown them love in the best way, and for that, I need to publicly recognize that with them. They need to know what I'M thinking and how I'M feeling and that we all need to give a little more, not just them. I am glad they are seeing me mess up, though. I hope and pray it's teaching them that nobody is perfect, and that even people who love Jesus can have bad days or get really irritated with other people. I want my life to reflect that of a humble servant of Christ, and it has to start with where my heart is at.
We have a 4 day weekend that I am SO looking forward to making some big changes for our next parcial! We just finished up our first parcial with exams this past week and now we get to work on plans for the next parcial. For me, that means both with the curriculum as well as the behavior. I am still struggling with my one class I told you about before, so if you could please keep praying for these relationships with those kids, that would be fantastic. =) I just want to shine bright for Christ and bring Him glory, even in the messed up package that I may look like some days.
In order to celebrate the month of giving thanks properly, I am going to try my hardest to post something on here once a day for a different thing that I'm thankful for. Today, in honor of my grandma Sue's birthday, I'm incredibly thankful for her sweet cards she sends me in the mail and the way she has been so intentional with checking in on me even though I'm 2,000 miles away now. I'm also thankful for having such a wonderful family that I can look forward to seeing again in about 50 days. It's hard being so far away from home, and it's even harder when you have such great people waiting for you there. However, it just means the reunion with them will be that much BETTER!
To end, I want to share with you what one of my 7th grade boys wrote in his notebook...
" The best place to me is Heaven. It's the most important place to me because Jesus is there."
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