The Pace of Grace

Get away with me and you'll recover your life.... Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace.... Keep company with me and you'll learn to live freely and lightly.

Matthew 11:28–30 MSG

The bell rang on the first day of school and the students began filing in. Excited chatter mixed, with sighs of resignation, floated from the hallways into the makeshift classroom of a temporary building. I had no idea the administration had given me such a big class for first period, I thought. I need to make sure I have enough material to keep all these kids busy or the next fifty minutes are going to be a disaster! When I looked down at my desk, I came to the devastating realization that I had left my lesson planner and all of my materials at home. I panicked and my mind went blank. I couldn't remember what I was supposed to teach. How would I make it through the day with no lesson plans?

If you have ever been a high school teacher, you will understand what I'm about to say. High school students are wild creatures. They detect unpreparedness the way a shark smells blood. They can sniff it out a mile away, and when they do, they go in for the kill. They will gather in packs. They will mark you as prey, and they will circle you, looking for a moment of weakness. When they find it, they will strike quickly, mercilessly, and relentlessly. You will bleed out hall passes and discipline slips until you are dry, and at the end of the day the janitor will sweep your depleted body off the floor with the pencil dust and little paper circles from the three-hole punch. As a teacher, my greatest ally is my lesson plan book. I had left mine at home, and now I was cast adrift in a hostile sea. I imagined the rest of my day, bluffing my way through each lecture. The next seven hours would be miserable.

The small, stuffy room was filled to capacity. Some kids were even sitting on the floor. This has to be a violation of some kind of code, I thought angrily. There's no way I can manage a class this size. I had stepped out from behind the desk, steeling my will to take on the challenge ahead, when the room fell suddenly and completely silent. What is going on? Through the open window I could hear the sound of the lawn mower grooming the football field and releasing that distinctive smell of summer, the scent of cut grass. A breeze began to blow through the room, providing welcome relief from the muggy morning heat. The tension of the moment hung in the air for what seemed like an hour. The mower, the green smell of fresh grass, and the gentle breezes held my senses hostage until I realized I was feeling the breezes somewhere I should not be feeling them—my upper thighs. The students' escalating snickers jerked me back into reality just as I looked down in horror to find I had forgotten more than my lesson plans that day. I had forgotten my pants!

And then I woke up.

It had all been a dream ... a particular kind of recurring nightmare I'd had for several weeks. These dreams all revolved around similar themes: being overwhelmed, being out of control, or missing an important deadline like college exams or, as I had just experienced, being unprepared for the first day of school. Why wouldn't they just go away?

I looked around the room to get my bearings. My husband was sleeping peacefully next to me, his chest rhythmically rising and falling with each breath. The moonlight peeking through the shades revealed I was safe—there were no students in the room waiting to mock me into oblivion for forgetting my pants. All was well. I sat up and looked at the clock near my bed and discovered it was 2:45 a.m. The sun was not up yet, thank goodness! I lay back down on my pillow, relieved I could indulge in almost four more hours of blissful sleep.

Unfortunately, sleep escaped my grasp that night—and it wasn't the first time. Until recently, I had always been the "sleepy one" in the family. By 9:00 p.m., I was usually the one stomping grumpily around the house, turning off the lights and the TV. I was the one gathering up the cell phones for the night and shooing everyone into their rooms so I could fall into bed. Now, all of a sudden, everyone was begging me to turn out the lights. I was unable to settle down in the evenings regardless of how tired I felt. I hid under the covers and played word games on my iPhone long after the lights went out. I woke suddenly for no apparent reason throughout the night. And, like this particular night, I wanted to go to back to sleep—I tried to—but the adrenaline rush that woke me up kept my mind and body in a state of high alert until the sun came up and the alarm went off.

As I lay there trying to fall back to sleep, I thought about this persistent and unwelcome disruption to my routine. I hadn't felt like myself in months. Why was I so out of whack? It was mid-November and the year was coming to a close, but in some ways I felt as if it had never really taken place. The months had flown by with one major transition after another. We had moved into a new house and immediately discovered a mold (and rodent!) infestation that took over a year to repair. My husband and I were both busier than we'd ever been, and we were finding it increasingly difficult to keep up with breakneck schedules and overlapping deadlines. All of these things—t he good and the bad—began to take on a life of their own. I constantly felt I was forgetting something important ... and usually I was. I just couldn't manage all the competing demands anymore. I felt like a hamster running on a wheel I couldn't keep pace with, and I didn't know how to jump off.

For the first time since planting our church, I felt like I wanted to quit. It's not that I didn't love our church ... I did. It's not that I wasn't grateful ... I was. But at that moment, my ministry commitments seemed like the only negotiable things left on the table. I already felt as if I was throwing cargo over the side of a rapidly sinking ship, and even the valuable boxes were fair game. I never thought I would feel that way. I never really understood it when other people felt that way, although I always tried to be encouraging and helpful. And yet, here I was, ready to throw in the towel on everything I had spent the last fifteen years of my life helping to build. I was ready to walk away and never look back.

It was such a lonely place to be, too. Nobody, not even my husband, knew how I was feeling. I believed that telling anyone I was ready to quit would seem selfish and weak....