The Teacher They All Assumed

The felt board is still in the cupboard. Nobody uses it now, and she cannot make herself throw it out, because there is a Jordan River on it made of blue felt that has been folded the same way since 1994 and has a permanent crease through the middle of it.

Thirty-one years in that room.

She has taught four hundred and something children in it, though she has never counted properly and would not want to, and she can tell you which chair each of the awkward ones sat in. The room smells of poster paint and radiator dust and, for about six weeks every autumn, of the pears from the tree outside the window that somebody always brings in and nobody ever eats.

She taught them the Red Sea with a bedsheet. She taught them Daniel with a flashlight under a chair. And every spring, when the older ones started asking the questions that the older ones always start asking, she taught them about the water, and she was good at it, and she never once said anything that was not true.

She simply never said the other thing either.

It came closest in 2009. A girl called Rhiannon, nine years old, sharp as a tack and entirely without fear, put her hand up in the middle of the lesson and said, "Miss, what was yours like?"

And she said, "Oh, we are not talking about me today," in exactly the warm, brisk, deflecting way she has said a thousand things to a thousand children, and the class moved on within four seconds, and Rhiannon is thirty-two now and has three children of her own and has absolutely no memory of asking.

She remembers.

She remembers because of what happened in her chest, which was not guilt exactly. It was more like the feeling of stepping onto a stair that is not there. A small internal lurch, gone in a second, and then thirty-one years of lessons carried on over the top of it.

Nobody has ever asked her since. Why would they. She is the woman who taught their mothers. She has stood at the front of that room since before some of the parents were born, and there is an assumption in that building about her that is so total and so unspoken that it would be like asking whether the building has foundations.

She is eighty-one now, and last Tuesday she was in the cupboard looking for the tambourines, and her hand went to the folded blue felt without her deciding it should, and she stood there in the dark with the door half open for a good long while.

Nobody is opening the file

I want to say the most important thing first, before anything else has a chance to get in the way of it.

I am not going to ask you about the thirty-one years.

There is no accounting due here. Nobody is going to make you go back through those lessons and separate out what was said from what was allowed to be assumed, and there is no version of this page that ends with you having to correct anybody. God is not standing at the front of that room with a register in His hand.

He knows exactly what you are made of, and He has known the whole time, and there is not a shred of disappointment in it.

Like as a father pitieth his children, so the LORD pitieth them that fear him. For he knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust.Psalm 103:13 and 14

Sit with the word remembereth for a moment, because it is doing something specific and very kind. It does not say He tolerates our frame or overlooks it. It says He keeps it in mind. He does not forget for a single second what we are built out of, and He never once designs His dealings with us on the assumption that we are something sturdier.

So hear this and let it be spoken over you rather than explained to you. You are pitied in the good old sense of that word, which means you are looked at tenderly by One who knows the whole of it. That is not my read on your situation. That is what is written, and the Holy Spirit inside you is the reason a line about dust is landing warm rather than bleak.

Now, let me name what I think the lurch on the stair actually was, because I do not think it was hypocrisy and I am fairly certain you have privately called it that at least once.

It was a small thing that went unmentioned, and then time went past, and the amount of time it had gone unmentioned became the reason it stayed unmentioned. That is not deceit. That is how a house gets built around a chair nobody wants to move. You have not been living a lie for three decades. You have been a faithful woman with one unopened drawer, and Scripture is what says that a faithful woman is what you are, and the Spirit of God who has been with you in that room since 1994 is not now revising His opinion.

I want to be careful here, because I know how this goes in a mind like yours. Give a conscientious woman an inch of grace and she will use it to build a more sophisticated accusation. So let me close that door.

You are not being told it does not matter. You are being told it is not what your standing rests on. You are His, and you were His through every single one of those thirty-one years, and you were His in 2009 in the four seconds after Rhiannon put her hand up. The written word settles that and the Spirit is the one carrying it into you now, and no assumption in that building, right or wrong, ever had the power to make it more or less true.

And here is the thing I most want you to have. You have taught four hundred children the truth. Not around it. The truth. Every Red Sea, every flashlight under a chair, every spring lesson about the water was true when you said it, and it did not become less true because of a drawer you did not open. God does not audit a life's work over an omission the way you would.