Change in the time of Change.

I have a friend of a friend who did the unthinkable.  He went back to college at the age of fifty and got his teaching certifiicate.  In class he was the wonder boy.  He was celebrated for the act of being persistent and changing the path of his life.  He was favored.  He graduated at the wonderful age of fifty-five.  In his mind, he thought that he was going to recieve what the college kids recieved who attended college in their twenties.  He even thought himself superior to those people.  Upon graduation, life settled in and one by one, all the youngsters began to get their first job.  He went on interviews and waited.  He never got called.  You see, fifty-five is too old to enter the teaching profession as a budding teacher.  You are so close to retirement that you will end up being a liability to the district.  I guess he did not thing that that mattered.  His timing did matter.  He did lose something by his lack of common sense.  Often times, we feel that if we just change with the times we will lose nothing.  This person changed and found that he lost everything.  There is a time and a season where you can sin and their is not enough time to make things right.  He should have been striving to change his career path while he could still give the district a twenty year reign.  As it stands, he may only be able to give ten before they would have to put more money into him than he would earn.  They don't tell the oldtimers that in college.  The old timers come to class with their shorts on and a bucket of coffee trying to relive what they did not do in their youth and it is sad.  They enter a market that leaves them out in the cold.  By the age of fifty, he should have been a superintendent or a dean, not a begining teacher, but no one told him that.  No one said that you will not have the same experience as those who attended college in the time of attending college.  You have to change in the time of changing.

Ashamed

When I was a budding fourteen,  my grandfather did the most embarrassing thing.  He dug up our backyard and planted mustard greens from the back porch to the alley.  Across the street from the home where he lived, there was one of those community centers where they handed out the free cheese, butter and powdered eggs.  In the cool of the morning, you could see the glistening faces waiting patiently for blocks of cheese aged by neglect and grade B butter dyed yellow.  They also handed out dried goods and I do mean dried goods.  Half of my hometown came out to get that old food and they were happy.  My grandfather was born in 1922.  He was a boy turning teen when the depression took hold of America.  I am told that they survived by hunting in the woods and growing their own food.  My grandfather had no shame in his green patch.  When times got hard, he bought a package of bacon and picked himself a pot of greens.  It was like seeing two worlds.  In one world, poverty was an advantage.  In the other world, poverty was fought like Goliath.  My great aunts and uncles would do just about anything to keep their heads above water and out of the soup line.  When I think of the jobs they held just to keep the family farm afloat, I am ashamed, not of them, but of us.  I have never chopped sugarcane.  I have never picked cotton.  I have never made a pot of soup out of a pig's tail and I have never made hog's head cheese.  These are skills that my grandfather had just to survive.  To think, I was ashamed of that green patch.  Over the years, I can remember a lot of people getting a pot of greens from the greens patch.  My grandfather always told the people to pinch the leaves off so that more would grow.  He did not just feed himself, he fed his community, and I was ashamed.

Deep

Shallow people are like shallow pools of water

No ripples or waves clear to the dirt

I can kick and splash with no regard

For getting the water on the hem of my skirt

If I stay too long the pool will fail

And the water will dry in the sun

It’s as though the end was prevalent

Before the beginning begun

Now, deep is something different

It’s pool has a tide and wave light bent

It ripples with earthquakes underneath

The place volcanoes vent

There my dead things are not disturbed

My demons so in the deep

I can splash on the surface with the dolphins

And my dragons can still sleep

I can come to the surface in full sun

And see the ships go past

Then retreat to a cave full of darkness

Peace and quiet at last

Playing God

I teach behaviorally disordered children.  They all have their differences.  To reward them, I give them a token for being good.  You can get up to 100 tokens a day.  At the end of the week, they spend the tokens on a little store that I set up.  When I have a severely problematic child, I may give them a token for doing things that the other children do automatically.  One child would not sit in his seat.  I gave him a token for sitting in his seat.  The other children received a token for getting their work done, but not for being in their seat.  On another day, I gave this troublesome child a token for staying in the room and not having to be put out.  I gave the other children tokens for getting their work done.  As time progressed, I had to reward my troubled child earlier in the day for him to make it through the day.  I rewarded him for the small gains he was taking but I only rewarded the students who did what they were supposed to do, their regular tokens.  One day, I looked at my chalkboard and behold, the kid who acted like an "nut" had more money than the kids who did not.  Now, I played God.  I took that chalk and I gave bonus after bonus to the children who did what they were supposed to do without reward.  I stood back, and if it did not look the way I wanted it to, I added more.  I usually did this on a Thursday because shopping day was Friday.  I made it so that the ones who were obedient had a lot of money, then I went to set up shop.  I priced things according to how much money they had.  My troubled child could only afford a bag of chips, but the others could get groceries.  If I had a special activity planned, I prepared the staff.  We took off our earrings, took off our shoes and rolled up our pants.  We did this because tokens don't buy special activity, behavior does.  The troublesome kid got the chips but he don't get the kit and caboodle.  Now, I have to just tell him that he did not earn the activity.  He will not get to go outside and play with the water guns when all he did was sit in his seat.  He will not get to make cookies when all he did was stay in the room.  Those rewards are for those children who did their work..  If he got mad, well, then we did what we had to do to stay safe.  God is like that in a way.  Heaven belongs to everyone, but that does not mean that all will get the same reward.  In the end, God will equalize things.  Heaven is the reward for repentance, but your crown is your reward for righteousness.  Some will get the crown and some will get wood, hay and stubble.

Plaid Illusions

I grew up in a town that was part blue collar and part white collar.  In high school, there was this grand illusion.  Some of my classmates had parents who worked shifts at the plant.  Others had jobs in the professional sector.  At school, you could not tell the difference.  The doctor's kids came to school with plaid shorts and polo shirts.  The shift workers kids came to school with plaid shorts and polo shirts.  They partied together, they played sports together, they attended rally's together and they graduated together.  I wasn't in the crowd, but I did have the sense to know that the doctor's kids and I were not on the same plane.  We weren't in the same field.  I way out of their league.  I knew that I was not going to be successful without a college education and staying out of trouble.  What good would a college education do me if I was in jail or pregnant.  The shift workers were not like that, they really thought that they were equal to the kids with professional parents.  When I returned to my high school for my ten year reunion, life had dealt some heavy blows.  Two of my classmates were doctors.  That did not surprise anyone.  One of my classmates went to West Point.  That did not surprise us.  I showed up as a teacher with Reverend on the front of my name.  NO ONE was surprised.  The group that we were surprised by, were the kids of the shift workers.  The nineties was cruel as we saw one factory after another head for the border.  Those whose parents took shifts instead of going to college, were left jobless.  Their children woke up from the dream and landed in a nightmare.  Though they wore plaid shorts, they did not have secure futures and they were too busy with their IZOD jackets to notice it.  By the time our twenty year rolled around, most of the shift workers were in low paying jobs, self-employed or in prison.  You would be amazed at how many were in prison.  Some were just wandering around town trying to be twenty-one all over again.  I can hear them now, "If I knew then what I know now............."

The Gates

Another form of history tracking is what you allow in the gates.  You have five of them, the eye gate, the ear gate, the mouth gate, the mind gate and the heart gate.  You can develop patterns in the eye gate which are the things you historically allow yourself to see.  You have a pattern in the ear gate of what you historically allow yourself to hear.  You have patterns in the mouth gate that governs what you say.  You have a gate in the mind of what you allow yourself to think and of the heart on the things you allow yourself to love.  I used to have very open gates.  I listened to anything, I said anything and so on and so on.  I was born into a family that had very open gates.  We did everything but repent.  When I became serious about being a christian, the gates became regulated.   For a season, I refused to see rated R movies.  I began to dress conservatively, meaning, everything was covered up.  I began listening to gospel music.  I refused to date boys who were not saved.  I am learning to be more positive than negative.  My mind gate is the gate I have the hardest time keeping guarded, but I won't stop trying.  Everything around you has to be selective and even exclusive.  I have learned to go to art museums just for the glimpse of beauty on the wall.  I stroll through gardens.  I listen to positive music.  You can't go wrong with gospel, but now, I have added some secular artist who are not vulgar.  I have learned to tame my tongue.  I don't say everything that I want to say.  I refuse to allow myself the luxury of profanity.  Speaking ugly makes you look ugly.  If a movie doesn't have some sort of deep point, I am not interested and  always skip the love scenes.  Most of all, I guard my emotions.  I can't fall in love with the enemy and hope it will work out anyway.  Guarding my gate is a full time job, but here are the things I will gladly let in.  I learned them at tonight's Bible study which has greatly affected my life.

Whatsoever things are pure
Whatsoever things are lovely
Whatsoever things are honest
Whatsoever things are true
If there is any virtue( Meaning Deep)
If there is any praise
I will let you in.

I love this song because this scripture is in it.
Treat Myself/Stevie Wonder
http://youtu.be/RLO19VjHjEs

Negative Success

Negative success is the term I use for being in the condition of losing and gaining.  As a child, I saw my parents buy cars and then lose them.  We had a house and then we lost it.  We had power and then we lost it.  Every time we took one step forward, we took two steps back.  It became our history and our pattern.  I knew if we got something, not to hold on to it because it would be a matter of time before we would lose it again.  Well, that pattern was hooked up to their behavior.  They had a history of signing up for items on a payment plan and then not paying on the payment plan.  Therefore, the furniture was taken back, the china cabinet was taken back and every car they owned was repossessed.  The Bible states that the wicked borrow and do not pay it back.  I remember when they did not pay the power bill and we had no electricity for a year.  I learned something from that.  Going from flop to failure and from failure to flop is not the pattern I want to establish in my life.  One associate of mine has lost more jobs than I have fingers to count them.  We both are at a point in our lives where we should have something but she is starting all over again.  Once again, the blood covers her sin, but she has to change her behavior.  Negative success looks bad over time.  When I was 21, none of us had anything.  We were in college and money was hard to come by.  When I got thirty, we were at least established in our fields with roots or we were in graduate school.  In my thirties, we worked in our careers, started families, bought homes and managed the debt of the previous decade.  Now that I am forty, I am not looking for someone still in college eating Ramen noodles.  Someone who shows up at that age with nothing tells me that there had to be some kind of negative success.  Somehow, that person blew it and is blossoming a bit late.  It looks bad to be forty and living in your parents basement.  It looks bad when you are forty and your kids are taking care of you.  It looks bad when you are trying to date someone established and they have to pick you up, pay for the dinner, get the tip, buy the coffee, pay the parking meter and then drop you off before the lights go out at the mission.  Righteousness will give you a victory to victory history.  It leaves you impressive.  it makes you glow like new money.  It makes you able to pick me up in your second car, drive me to a great restaurant, pay for dinner, get the tip, buy the dinner coffee and sit by the lake until the fireflies turn off.  That is the kind of success I like.