As the quarantine continues and the end seems vague at best, many people, including myself, find ourselves at an odd place. If you are like me, you find yourself stuck at the odd juxtaposition of needing to quarantine and needing to work. The contrast of what is and what should be.
As a teacher, I am eternally grateful that I can work from home. That I can, to the best of my ability, provide learning and encouragement to my students who are now scattered across the globe, trying to finish off the year outside of the classroom.
But I don’t want it to be this way.
I think you would be hard-pressed to find a teacher who said they would rather teach from home than in a classroom. For most teachers, teaching was a calling, not just a profession. We pour our hearts and souls into our students. I loved the goofy jokes my seventh graders would be bursting to tell me each day. I struggled alongside my eighth graders as we took on what it means to be creative writers. I cried with pride when my ninth graders got raw and real with their personal narrations.
And now the classroom is empty. And as a teacher I find myself in the last place I want to teach from: home.
I joke with my teacher friends that I am not a teacher anymore: I am an IT worker who answers emails and a YouTuber who records lessons. Yes, there are still lessons. There is still great work to be done. But the essence that called me to be a teacher, that daily work where I got to touch lives, make jokes, live in community, feels heartbreakingly absent.
The motivation to keep going evades me and I know I am not the only one. Other professions besides teaching also relied on that human contact, that togetherness that is no longer there. I may be an introvert, but I have never wanted to be surrounded by 24 chatty seventh graders more in my life.
I am in the last place I want to be.
So where do we find hope from here?
The Bible study I do with a few of my teacher friends is studying the story of Gideon. He has just three short chapters in the book of Judges to tell his story. But, my, is it a powerful one.
When we think of Gideon, we think of the Mighty Warrior who defeated the enemies of Israel with just a blow of a trumpet. But when we meet Gideon, he isn’t what we might envision.
Judges 6:11 says, “Now the angel of the Lord came and sat under the terebinth at Ophrah... where Gideon was beating out wheat in the winepress to hide it from the Midianites.”
Why is he beating wheat in a winepress? The context of the story is that the Israelites were in their 8th year of being attacked by the Midianites. They would come, steal all the food after it had been harvested, and kill anyone who got in their way. So Gideon, instead of beating wheat on a hilltop where wheat was supposed to be beaten, where the wind could help carry away the worthless chaff, where the job was best done, was instead hiding in a dark, damp, windless space. He was in crisis.
I feel a strong connection to Gideon these days. Instead of being the classroom, where I am supposed to be teaching, where the live-action of real-time learning helps my students interact and grow, where my job is best done, I am instead at home writing lesson plans from my bedroom. I am, like many, in crisis.
And yet...
This isn’t a story of despair. Gideon’s story is one of triumph and victory. But even if we don’t skip ahead to the end and see the victory, I think I learned a lot from just this one verse about how to behave in a crisis.
You see, Gideon wasn’t ignoring his work. He didn’t give up just because he couldn’t be doing the job he wanted in the place he wanted to do it. He didn’t shrug his shoulders and say, “Oh well, I can’t be on the hilltop so I can’t do the work.” And he didn’t give that work to others. There was nobody else in that winepress even though the job was much harder now. No. Gideon was doing his job when the Angel of the Lord found him. He was beating the wheat to feed his family.
He was found faithful in the crisis. And in that, I find my hope.
From this verse alone, I take great comfort in the following ideas:
1) This crisis is not powerful enough to place you out of the reach of God. God found Gideon in the winepress; he will find me at home.
2) Just because the task is harder, it doesn't mean the work isn’t worth doing. The daily reward of interacting with my students is no longer there, but my work is still meaningful and helpful to others.
3) You don’t need what you thought you would need when you have God’s help. I thought I needed my classroom, my teaching tools, my daily routines to teach. But it turns out, meaningful learning can still occur outside of the classroom. I am pleased to say students who normally were indifferent and forgetful have stepped up and been more active in their education.
With these in mind, I hope you are encouraged, like I am, to move forward. As Gandalf wisely says, we don’t get to choose our time, “all we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
We have been given this time and place to do our work.
May we be found faithful.
-Rachael
