Working and Apartment Hunting

I’m so grateful for God’s order in my life.

As my lead teacher and I were talking last month, I mentioned that I had been on Stockton’s poetry team when I was in high school. “Really? We have a poetry unit coming up,” She responded. “You can take it.” I was both nervous and excited. I love poetry and I LOVE when kids understand it. Watching other people fall in love with your passion is like falling in love with it all over again. … It just comes at the risk of having people completely reject or dismiss it, too. Two of our three English classes have been working on poetry units over the last couple of weeks and I’ve been able to introduce lessons, grade a lot of papers, and work one-on-one with various teenagers to help them understand pastoral poetry, psalms, and a dialect poem. The units are wrapping in both classes with quizzes next week.

I believe my students benefited from this experience (reading their short responses to Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “We Wear the Mask” was enlightening) and I know I did, too. All of the readings were pre-selected as part of our course curriculum, but they were all personally relevant to me. The class that studied pastoral poetry and a couple of psalms did so as part of a Renaissance unit. As this was a twelfth grade language and literature class, all of these texts were taught from KJV (12th grade reading level). As I was reviewing the unit to prepare for the lessons, I realized one of the psalms was one I had been reading and re-read for weeks and the other was one I memorized as a child. An excerpt from the sermon on the mount was included as well. Going through them for my lessons this go-’round was interesting because they were reminders to me that God can handle more than what I regard as “my lightweight.” Worry is a waste of energy–it changes nothing and God can make all the difference in the world.

Today, I am taking my cousin with me to see and apply for a place in an apartment that I fell in love with last weekend. I left the building, last week, raving to my family about it, telling them how it felt “like a God-thing”– like God had set everything up for me specifically. Then, I got home and worry started setting in. I prayed it off and started this week saying, “What God has for me is for me.” After a few days of inconsistent contact with the landlady, I again began to worry… I was soon reading “The Lord is my shepherd I shall not want” over and over. At the end of the week, I had also read, “Which of you by taking thought can add a cubit unto his stature?”

I laughed and said, “Okay, Lord.”

Then, yesterday hit. My lead teacher asked me if I had heard back from the landlady, yet. I told her that I hadn’t, and reflexively checked my email like hope had become my habit… and there it was! The email I had been waiting for was in my inbox: Is noon okay?

Noon is perfect, I sent back.

Even when my eyes can’t see it
I’ll sing ’til I believe it
Even louder, even louder             –“Even Louder (Spontaneous)” by The Church Will Sing