Since getting home I have completely dropped the habit of blogging, but with medical school about to start and my summer about to end I felt like I should at least attempt to sum up the year a bit (and later decide where to take the blog from here)...
My first sum up entry is going to be simple: the three most memorable quotes from the year. There were plenty of funny ones especially from the students, but for this I chose the three that most spoke to my heart where I was at that particular time. So in no particular order, my favorite quotes from the year.
The first quote speaks to how much I was missing my family and how much more important a simple "hello" or "I love you" became even if it was via email. My grandmother wrote me an email at one point (can't remember when exactly, but it was after Christmas) and I remember being in a place where I was having a bit of a pity party. Struggling to stay surrendered to the work that I was doing for the sake of the students and just wanting a bit of a break, I read the email before setting to work on lesson plans for the night. One line of the email read, "Pa paw just walked in and said, 'Tell her that I love her.'" I broke down into tears right there. It is difficult to explain exactly why, but the vision in my head was that of God our Father looking at Christ in the middle of his suffering and saying, "I can't take this suffering from you, but remember that I love you." From 1500 miles away, they could not make my tasks any easier and they weren't meant to, but they could remind me that they loved me and that there were people waiting for me on the other side.
Quote number two represents a little bit of a turning point (little being the key word) in my teaching year. In February the topic for one of the high school assemblies was, of course, love. And as luck (or God's design) would have it, one of the teacher's asked me to give a short talk on my views of physicality in dating relationships. Oh boy. (And I can't remember if I wrote a blog about it already or not, but no matter, I'll write about it again) So after giving my abstinence speech (lol!), one of my seventh graders came up to me with the only verbal response I got from any of the students, "Miss, you're brave. The other teachers no its wrong, but you actually told them it's wrong." I wasn't particularly proud of myself, but I was encouraged that maybe I had finally done something to get there attention a bit. And I did notice that the 8th grade boys behaved better in class after that...
The third quote has to be the much appreciated words from one of my cousins, sent via FB. I can't remember if he had actually heard through the grapevine that I was struggling with things in the fall or if he just assumed I would be (safe assumption). Either way his encouragement for me was this:
"The best piece of advice I know for a situation like this is: get on the boat, do your job, and come back home."
Getting on the boat was the easy part. Staying there and doing my job was much more difficult, but the hope of the last part "come back home" was what kept me going.
For any of those amazing people who kept up with me this past year and prayed for me and sent me encouraging words, I want to say thank you! I would not have made it without you all and more importantly, I wouldn't have been able to pour out as much if it weren't for you all pouring in. This side of heaven I'll never know if I really did any good or not, but I learned so much and am so thankful God gave me the chance to represent him to his precious Honduran children.
Aww this was lovely!
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