Clean That Window
Yesterday I spent thirty or fourty minutes cleaning our bedroom window. The soon-to-be-spring sun was trying to shine through the winter drops, spider webs, and grundge. We have a large second floor window that overlooks a beautiful park. The greens and blues and people having fun out our window are a gift. When we can see them through the fogs of weather or window. Yesterday was beautiful, so I cleaned the windows with sun shining on me. I swung wide the panes, reached outside, brushed away dead spiders and leaves, and polished the glass. I used too many towels. So, today I opened the curtains ready to enjoy the rays landing on our bed and warming the winter out. But, today is cloudy. No bright sun. I lay in bed looking at smudges that only show in the gloomy light. I got up and did some more polishing. Waiting for sun. I had spent the sunny day cleaning the dirt. I missed the joy. I hadn’t cleaned them before the sun wanted in. I wonder how many times I wait for the right moment and when it comes, I am not ready. I missed my chance. Think of words to Joshua, “Be strong and courageous.” Strong comes before courageous. If you are not strong, when the moment for courage comes, you are not ready. Strength comes from work ahead, preparation, time invested. Keeping ourselves clean and ready. What does it mean to be ready? What does it mean to be ready for the sunshine, to be ready for walking into life with courage. To have things cleaned up so the unexpected guest in life can step into your world for a few minutes or for lunch in your home? To have courage to do as Joshua and enter the Promised Land? What does it mean to have my heart clean so I am ready to serve well, to encourage or to have the grace and strength to listen? What needs to be in order so we are ready for the next thing or the opportunity to step into the “promised land” God brings today or tomorrow? Maybe you can think of ways to have your window clean and ready to take in the sun. Here are some I thought:
- Consider and confess my sins, regularly.
- Have no regrets, clearing up relationships best we can.
- Be well versed and shaped by God’s Word.
- Slow down enough to notice the things that cloud joy and grace.
- Get rid of junk in my life that distracts from what is important.
- Have my heart calm, to know that God is God, not me.
- To listen and hear.
I am sure you have your own smudges God would like to clean to be ready for His grace, to be able to step into what He brings. What are they? What can you do today to let the sun shine in and warm you? To be ready when the time comes. The sun will come out tomorrow. I look forward to enjoying it next time. Maybe even later today.
Transformation from a Distance
Lesson plans shape how your students learn. Often approaches are similar, maybe sliced up differently. A favorite of mine for years was this:
1. Students: Know your learners. Previous learning, abilities, disabilities, culture, attitudes, etc.
2. Outcomes: What are you trying to have the learner know (cognitive), feel (affective), and do (psychomotor)?
3. Methods: How will you take these learners from where they are to the learning outcomes? Methods are not the end, they are the creative tools to get there.
4. Assess: Did your learners achieve the outcomes? Summative, yes, but more important for learning is formative assessment: minute by minute, are they getting it? And how do you adjust?
I encouraged my teachers to use the approach. We built planning around it and had success.
A Missing Part
But something was missing. The essential part for powerful, wholistic transformational education. The part that makes what you do different than most classes in the world, online or in person.
You could say that biblical integration is missing. However, if you are wrapping biblical truth into these steps it might not be missing. Here is part of the problem: biblical integration does not equal transformational education. TeachBeyond transformational education goes beyond.
You might say that God is missing. But you can teach about God in this approach. He does not have to be missing. But, just teaching about God is not transformational education.
I have heard teachers say that the piece missing is “heart.” This is a good answer. After all, when we do transformational education we aim at the inside first, heart and head, instead of outside behaviors.
But what brings “heart” into it? What makes transformational education work?
The missing part in this plan: you.
You see, transformational education is about life. It is about changed, transformed lives. It is about bringing together you, the learner, the Holy Spirit, and God’s Word—all alive—and watching God “cause the growth.”
Transformational education is life on life, placing a transformed teacher in touch with a learner. You are the “living curriculum” that God uses. Excellent educational environments, one of our pillars of transformational education, brings this life together. It makes education about life in the subjects and in hearts. You are essential.
The Challenge of Online Learning
A teacher who walks into a physical classroom cannot help touching lives, for good or for bad. Students watch hour after hour. The teacher’s life becomes a book read by learners.
Good transformational educators bring themselves into class. Their love for God lived out impresses learners. Their unconditional love for students, shown in action, reaches hearts. Their love for their subject, the gift they give, shows in a passion that draws students into learning.
But, in an online class, a teacher can hide behind the screen and present a relatively sterile lesson. It is possible to go through the steps, having curricular goals achieved, and barely bring yourself into the class.
The challenge of online learning is to bring yourself, your whole self, transformed by the Holy Spirit, into your class. Here are some ideas that I have heard from great online, transformational teachers:
- See your class as your space, your home. Make it unique and personal as you invite students into “your online home.”
- Love, above all love. Ask yourself, how will you show love today? For God, for the learners, and for the gift you give them.
- Know individuals. Get to know each, have side notes or meetings. Treat each as a whole, living person with interests and needs. Pray for individuals.
- Show heart. Show your changed heart. Talk openly with learners about heart. Be real. Show your “inside.”
- Plan engagement. Make space for active learner engagement. In the online world, everyone is starved for interaction. Use online groups, discussions, art, side chats. Help learners speak and connect.
- Take care of yourself. “Zoom fatigue” is real. You need to care for your needs and not just keep plowing ahead. Take time to know that God is God and enjoy God’s goodness, even in lockdown.
- Give yourself permission. Know that you not only have permission to bring “you” into class, but if you want to transform lives, you must.
- Focus on the big things. Never forget that while students need to know nouns and verbs or equations, the more basic need is to know God and how a life is lived with Him. Keep those in front of you.
There are more ways. You are probably thinking of some now. Maybe talk with colleagues about what they do and keep the idea of bringing yourself into your class alive.
After I realized that I was missing the key to transformational education, I put this step between “know students” and “know outcomes”: Teacher: What flows from your life and heart?
Transformational education needs you to be there. As God changes you, may your learners see Him and be transformed by His grace.
(This piece was written for TeachBeyond’s On Practice publication)
Personal Core Values for a Lifetime of Leading
Your school or organization should have core values, a handful of items that tell everyone what is important. These values become the basis for decision making, interactions with publics, long-term planning, and use of resources. They are where you go when emotions are high or a situation heavy.
Public core values help everyone know what your organization is really about and how it operates. Then, even if some don’t agree, they know why you do what you do and that everything isn’t open to negotiation. Integrity is doing what you say you will do: having core values lets everyone see you are consistent in word and action and not playing favorites or unsteady.
You should have core values for yourself. They don’t need to be on display, but those close to you should know them and hold you to keeping them in your life.
Just as core values help a school, your personal ones will guide you in decisions as you serve in a long term ministry of school or organizational leadership with the constant pressure to do more, to bend, or to do what is good instead of what is best. Using your core values helps you sustain your work for years with personal integrity and peace. Even if others disagree.
Take time to identify three to six values that are most important in your life. Share them with your spouse, children, or close friends. You can always change them. But, have a set that will help you wade through the daily flow of life with consistency and courage, doing what is right.
Values are guides, not goals. They are also not priorities, although you could list them that way. Ideally, you live out all of your values and never have to decide between two or more of them. If you find yourself often needing to pick one over the other in your life, you should either reconsider the values or how you are living.
Values should reflect the beliefs that are most relevant to you, your situation, your gifts, and your call. They should be more than one word, with a brief description that helps you. Don’t worry about grammar, whatever works for you to use.
You don’t need to list everything that you believe is important or right. Just what you want to emphasize at this point in life. Examples of values that you may have:
• God: life is about Him, not me. For His glory.
• Bible: first source of truth, primary, sufficient.
• Family: deep care, meet needs, healthy, spouse.
• World: truths shared broadly, used by God.
• Creativity: fresh, study, as new wineskins.
When you have to make a decision about your time, talents, or money, these guide you. Identified core values help you serve over years in intense ministry with joy and peace.
The Powerful Pedagogy of Love
The most powerful pedagogy happens when there is a living convergence in a teacher of a love for God, a love for subject, and a love for student. It is simple. But, it is deep, and as true love does, keeps growing with a passion to know more about the beloved and to give more.
In the classroom with the three loves, in the moment of teaching, with sparkling eyes and reaching hands, the three loves search in the corners of knowledge and heart for just the right example, the most telling fact, the hook that will not let students get away. Truth and life are learned. Love is powerful.
The model isn’t simply knowing Jesus, understanding students, and earning a degree in a subject area. Great impact depends on a teacher’s love and passion for each of these: Jesus, students, and subject. A love that never ends, that is never satisfied or satiated. The love for each that commandeers a teacher’s heart and keeps him or her always pursuing, always learning, always hoping, always growing so that at the moment of the lesson in real time and real life, there is a fresh excitement and joy that draws from an ever increasing body of knowledge buoyed by an ever increasing love for God, students, and subject.
A teacher who loves wants this rich sweet spot now, all of the time, but knows it will take time to learn and grow and that they will have only moments of great teaching for a while before the moments pile on moments and become normal. This teacher knows that whatever others have learned and do, his or her joy comes from what he or she builds, not comparing to others because the well is deep enough for everyone and different in moment and place.
This teacher is sometimes hard to find because he or she just loves doing this with students and is immersed with them, not promoting self, very content to do her thing with students and not boast. This teacher never gives up and knows that there is always more, that even if something derails her heart and work, the best thing is to keep learning and loving and the passion will come back because real love is a commitment not a feeling. This teacher always looks for truth and rejoices in sharing what they find, never ending and always overflowing; she just can’t keep it in.
The teacher who loves God, students, and subject has something to offer that others don’t. Passion for each keeps the teacher relevant and current, and caring. Students don’t care to learn until they know the teacher cares. The impact for learning is greatest when it is obvious the teacher cares not only about the student, but also about the subject and God.
Because of this teacher’s love, which is always about an unconditional commitment to others and not just making everyone comfortable and happy, this teacher is something special. This teacher makes a difference, he or she can hardly help it because of the passion that overflows. Even if he or she is a rookie, a genuine and passionate love for God, students, and subject will make him or her valuable. This teacher will always profit a student, and not just be a dead spot in the student’s day.
A teacher who doesn’t care, who doesn’t love outside self, but is content or callous will never be a transformative teacher. He or she might warm a classroom and keep order, might even have students learn topics from the curriculum map, but will never make an impact worth remembering in the lives of students.
Love for God. Love for students. And love for subject–the gift the teacher gives. Brought together in a space with students sees lives transformed. By God’s grace.
The Courage of Stepping Up
A barricade of poles appeared on the steep part of the trail where I walked. I had seen a lot of odd things in these woods, but never had someone put logs in my way.
I wasn’t about to go around the poles just because someone put them there. And, stepping over was hard. For three days I grumbled to myself as I climbed, having to lift my foot high to step over the poles. On the fourth day, I didn’t lift my foot high enough, so I stepped down on the poles.
I realized that I had been making a mistake. Certainly, complaining was a mistake. But my whole view was off. Probably because I didn’t like someone interfering with my trail, I liked it how it was. My attitude clouded my eyes.
When I stepped down on the poles, I realized this wasn’t a barrier to make it harder.
This was a step.
It actually made the climb up or down easier and safer. Why didn’t I see it sooner?
I wonder how often I see things as barriers, as trouble, and they are really steps to help me get up or down. I wonder how the way I look at things makes them hard when they could be for good.
Isn’t it this way with most problems? We really do learn from them, which then helps us take the next step even better.
Or fears. When we step right up to those things we are afraid of, instead of going over them or around them, we build courage for the next time and begin to look at obstacles as opportunities. We grow and learn that obstacles help make us who we are, for good. And, our example as we encounter problems influences others, especially our children.
Our children need to see problems and fears as opportunities to grow and make a difference, not something to high step over or find a way around. Grumbling and avoiding only bring us down. Seeing obstacles as opportunities takes us higher.
Is it an obstacle or an opportunity?
Courage is built by taking one step at a time.
Grumbling or giving in keeps our children from learning that they can step up, that things do work out, that God won’t try them beyond what they can endure. That He is with them, now and in the future.
Grumbling or giving in keeps us from becoming who God wants us to be and from what He wants us to do.
Let’s see poles as steps, not barriers.
Courage, The First Virture
“Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the point of highest reality.” C.S. Lewis in Screwtape Letters
A few years ago, John Stonestreet (of the Chuck Colson Center and Summit Ministries) shared with our faculty. As John helped us better understand biblical worldview, he landed on the importance of courage in the lives of our children: “Dreams do not determine destiny; decisions determine destiny.” It is courage that moves dreams and beliefs to decisions and action.
Here are some of Stonestreet’s comments:
- Being human means to be courageous, not just know truth but courageous to use it.
- To raise children to make right decisions and not just know the truth requires courage: “It is by his deeds that a lad makes himself known if his conduct is pure and right” (Proverbs 20:11).
- In the classic virtues, courage allowed the others to exist.
- Children want to be courageous and we offer them video games.
- A biblical worldview makes the right decision when in a tough spot, which takes courage.
- A biblical worldview is not just thought out but is lived out.
- A biblical worldview is not primarily expressed but embodied.
How do we create courage? Stonestreet suggests:
- Be aware that everything we do is forming children’s souls; all education is worldview shaping.
- Teach habits. He quotes Aristotle: “So it is a matter of no little importance what sort of habits we form from the earliest age–it makes a vast difference, or rather all the difference in the world.”
- Shift from entitlement to responsibility.
- Teach children to leave things better than they found them.
- Give children words to use in tough moments.
From the Voyage of the Dawn Treader, John explained how we can create courage in our children. In Dawn Treader, Eustace is a boy with no “chest,” a boy who has not trained his emotions and is a victim of his feelings. He knows about ships but has never been on one. He has never been taught about dragons!
Stonestreet says that children should know two things about dragons: 1. They exist. 2. They can be beaten.
In Dawn Treader, help comes from an unlikely source. Reepicheep, the mouse, has courage. He mentors Eustace. He helps Eustace by stripping away the dragon flesh and shows that Eustace has grown a chest. We need to mentor our children to defeat dragons. And, celebrate their courage.
Stonestreet says that our children must:
1. Know what is true and good (not just right from wrong).
2. Practice what is true and good (weight lifters don’t get strong without the practice of lifting weights).
3. Learn and practice repentance, a way to actively follow Jesus with courage instead of being passive.
We need to teach our children how to defeat dragons. We need to put them on boats and teach courage so they can put ideas into action. Thanks to John for his thoughts.
Beginnings
“What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.”
T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding V
I have struggled for weeks, months actually, with the proper beginning here. Wanting this space to be just right, and the words that fill it for the first time to be words to not regret and words that would set the right banter here for years ahead. When you write like this, you are supposed to find your niche and your voice from the beginning.
But, I don’t know where these ideas will go and what the space will need to look like. I just need to start, knowing that every time I put down a new sentence it is the end of that thought, and that makes room for another, a new direction if I need it. I don’t have to have it figured out. I just need to start and get the beginning over so I can move to the hope of another beginning.
Eliot helps me a little further along in Little Gidding:
“With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling,
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”
I want to explore, that is what I love.
I am not a poet even though I sometimes carry Eliot when I travel. More than anything I see myself as the son of a machinist who always had courage to step into the next thing. This space and my voice, if I have one, will change because we start over at each end with new hope and another glimmer of this “Love and the voice of this Calling.” When we arrive where we started we go into the next day with new glimpses of Grace and Truth, knowing as if for the first time.
Thanks for the adventure. Let’s see where it goes.
Trapped by a Virus
Paul was in chains when he wrote Ephesians. A missionary who couldn’t go anywhere. An encourager who couldn’t give courage. A teacher who couldn’t go to his students.
Each day this week, I feel more this way. And, you probably do, too.
The virus has closed doors and put up walls. It has taken away hugs and handshakes and looking at students in the eyes. Like Paul, we are trapped, increasingly bound by a virus. Kept from doing the work we are called to do.
What did Paul do about being chained? His heart was to be with people, to teach and love and show them Christ. But, he couldn’t. So he wrote one of the best loved and most influential epistles: Ephesians.
And, at the end, Paul said to do these two things.
Pray. “With all prayer and petition pray at all times in the Spirit, and with this in view, be on the alert with all perseverance and petition for all the saints.” 6:18
My mother was in a nursing home, in bed for years. One time I asked her what she did all day. She said she prayed for my sister and me and our families. She was trapped, but powerful. I am convinced her prayers changed our lives.
Paul was convinced, too. Nothing can stop prayer. It gets through any barrier, any wall, and goes where no plane or train can. When we are trapped, we really aren’t. Pray. God is at work.
Boldness. “And pray on my behalf, that utterance may be given to me in the opening of my mouth, to make known with boldness the mystery of the gospel, for which I am an ambassador in chains; that in proclaiming it I may speak boldly, as I ought to speak.” 6:19-20
What a strange thing to ask when trapped, with the same people who have heard the same things. Perhaps we are inclined to shrivel up and give up when we are trapped. But, Paul asks to be bold. Twice.
Our open and bold proclamation of the Good News has even more power when everyone would expect us to draw back, to give up. Boldness in captivity, about the right things, spreads from person to person, just like a virus. It touches lives who see something different. People are in awe of a great God who would make us bold when things seem impossible.
Now is the time to be bold. To let the mystery of the Gospel reach deeply in our lives and overflow into our talk and our lives. When things are hard, God gives his people courage to go on, to do what they can with what they have.
That is always what He uses. What we have. And, through miracles he changes water to wine, makes one loaf into hundreds. Use what you have now, in your place at this time, with boldness for Him.
He will take it from there.