My Teacher

It took me nearly a hundred years to realize what she was doing.  By the time I finally came to understand what hindsight shows as such an obvious thing, she had died.  I have regretted for a long time I did not thank her for the impact she had on my life.  I was too busy for so long to see such things.   Mrs. Evans was her name and she was my English and Literature teacher in high school.  She opened a world I had never seen as she introduced me to great writers and she taught me basic stuff about the use of words and encouraged me in numerous ways to write.

What she did was prepare me for my life's work.   As a hammer is a carpenter's tool, mine has been words.  I have taken words and shaped them into sermons.  And, if preaching was my professional passion, writing has been my personal passion.  For as long as I can remember, I have been drawn to putting words together.  Somehow she took what was in me, gave it shape, and sent me on my way as one who was more prepared to do what God would later call me to do.

She was not doing anything special for me.  What she offered was for anyone in her class.  But, after all these years I have come to a conviction that she was a partner with God in getting me ready to do His bidding.  To be able to see this in these days is to wonder how it is that God uses you and me to prepare other folks for what He will be calling them to do.  It may not be a life of preaching, but something like passing on an act of kindness, or understanding, or forgiveness in what seems to be an impossible situation.  Could it be that God is using the things we are offering to others in our relationships with them as something which is actually preparing them for a ministry, or, perhaps, a great moment of darkness which is looming up the road they walk.  My teacher has taught me to know that such is always a possibility.