What Works and What Doesn't

About 24 hours ago, I was putting together a lesson plan for a class I teach. For the first two days of this class, I tried to create my plans from scratch. This was clearly not the most efficient way to do thing, as it took me three or four hours to do one fifty-minute plan. But I was determined to do it on my own so I pushed through it. I was also completely miserable. I finally put my pride on the shelf and asked a much more experienced instructor for her lesson plans. Now it takes me half the time to examine the prepared lesson plans and tweak them to my own style and preference.

Lesson #1 from this experience: most people (and certainly God ) are more than willing to help if you just ask.

Back to 24 hours ago.

The lesson plan was going a little bit slower than usual this night, even with the help of the already-made plans I used as a base. For the big activity in the middle of the lesson, I decided to just copy and paste the original activity since it was already "clear enough" and easy to explain without my making adjustments to my own way of teaching and explaining.

The next day--today--my lesson was going quite smoothly The class was engaged and participating. I came to the middle activity, the one I stole, for lack of a better term. As I tried to ask questions and explain the concept, I found myself fumbling. I was trying to make sense of the graph that the experienced instructor used. I paused and tried to figure it out while the class waited expectantly. Time slowed down and I'm sure my face started to redden. After I got things figured out, the students started asking questions from the chart I drew on the board. Still trying to recover, I had to think and think and think about their questions. It was a small disaster.

Lesson #2 from this experience: you really need to be yourself and do what works for you, because what works for someone else won't always be the best thing for you. If I had taken the time (24 hours ago) to revamp the chart in a way that made sense to me and a way that I could easily explain - in essence make it my own - the awkward pauses and silences and regroupings today could have been avoided. My students need me and my style to learn, not someone else's, just in the same way that the students of my instructor/benefactor needed her and her style to learn. This is a lesson that is easy to learn in this situation but a lot harder to learn in real life, I think. The feelings I had today after class were very similar to the ones I have after an experience where I knew I was trying to be someone else because I thought that would work better. But in reality, it just makes things harder and worse. It sounds really campy, but people really are basically different for a reason.

Someone to Talk To

It's been a while since I've posted anything on the blog....mostly because it's been a while since anything has really made me think "Gosh, I'd like to write a post about this" or "This would make a great blog post!" While all the things on this blog are personal, there are a lot of personal things and then personal things to sift through before I get to things I want to post. So while life has continued and things have happened since my last post, it wasn't until tonight that I had something that (I feel) is worth saying.

One of my basic needs that is personal to me is a need to be understood. It's often hard for me to talk to people about how I really feel, mostly when it's something hard in my life, because I know that they can't understand it. I know they want to help me more than anything, but because I know deep down that
they can't understand, they often can't do anything, so I just opt to not say anything at all.

Another piece of information that's important in order to understand the eventual point of this post is that I've always heard people say that they know they can always talk to God about everything and anything. Whatever it was, they could tell Him about it and somehow I imagined that everything turned out all right for them after saying that. I've always known that I could talk to God about anything, but I never really felt like I got answers. I know I had answers about several big decisions in my life, so I didn't doubt that He was there, but I wondered if He really did care about the small things in my life. Even in my hardest times, I never really felt any sort of comfort that people always talked about in their testimonies or stories. I never felt any sort of warm, loving feeling, no acceptance, no understanding.

I'm sure there were a number of factors that played into my feeling that way, but I'm not sure what they were and at this point I don't care. All I know is that things have changed. It's been so gradual that I didn't realize until tonight at around midnight as I was brushing my teeth how much I was looking forward to telling God about things that happened during my day, several of them uncomfortable things that I knew (don't ask me how) that only He would understand.

In the past few months, I've started really confiding in God. I mean really confiding. There comes a point in everyone's life when they truly have nobody to talk to. Sometimes, there simply is nobody I can talk to to make things better or easier, and certainly nobody who will understand. Happily, in my moments like that, I turned to God. I've laid things out on the table for Him, told Him that this is how things are and this is what's going on and this is how I feel. I've told Him that I am not sure how I ought to react or feel but this is how I am reacting and feeling. My prayers have been becoming less formulaic and more informal. I haven't been keeping back the "knitty gritty" stuff. Actually, when I talk to God, that "knitty gritty" stuff takes up a large portion of the conversation. Slowly, I've realized that God does understand. He understands and the best part is that He's okay with everything that I feel. And even better, because I know that He is OK with it, I am OK with it and am much less hard on myself for the little things that I keep inside to reproach myself with.

So at the end of the day (and the beginning of it), God is my go-to. He's given me people in my life that I can talk to when I need one kind of support or another, of course, but sometimes, there is just nobody but God that I feel comfortable talking to, nobody but Him who will understand. It's a relief to know that I don't have to preface how I feel with anything when I talk to God because He was there when it happened.

 It's really important to realize that this took a long time. I've also realized that this took a long time for probably every person who I ever heard say that they felt they could really talk to God and He understood them. I certainly haven't been there for all the times when they felt alone or wondered if God cared about the little things in their life. How can I expect to understand? I heard the end, or at least most recent, result of their experiences and I expected to get to that same point in a few days or fewer.

It's also important to realize that, even though God does understand and that brings me a lot of quiet comfort that can often go unnoticed, my problems do not go away as I expected and hoped when I heard people tell their stories. That wouldn't really make much sense. How on earth can I expect to overcome the problems if a few prayers and soulful confidence in God takes them away? No, because they are still present, that helps me remember my dependence on His constancy. And, while I still am not grateful for all the trials I have, I am grateful for the things that they have brought me, one of which is an answer to a long-asked question: Yes, God is there and He does care and (most of all for me) He does understand. That knowledge is something that is worth a lot to me and something that I hope I can always remember.

Peace

One of the biggest, if not the biggest, quests in this life is the quest to find peace. Peace changes according to the ideals of each person. Some people call it self-actualization, others dream of temporal comfort. Healthy relationships, financial security, a feeling that everything is going to turn out all right, all of these things fit the bill of someone's definition of peace.

For me, peace comes closest to the last idea on that short list. Peace goes beyond feeling good about myself, beyond having enough money, beyond having a lot of friends. Peace is something internal, something that can be independent of everything else that may be going on in my life. Something that is possible to have even if I didn't have any friends or any money, I believe and like to think, anyway.

Yesterday I heard someone say something that made me stop and think. After dwelling on the idea for a while, I realized that it was true and what's more, I had seen it in my own life. Yesterday, I heard a girl say that peace is not just an absence of trials or lack of conflict in our lives. It was a short sentence, but one with a lot of substance and room for expansion. We don't have to wait for things to get better in order to feel peace. While peace is a goal for myself and many other people, it is not something that takes superhuman effort over many weeks and months in order to achieve. In fact, the times when I think we can feel the most peace is in the midst of trials. How is this possible?

As I already said, peace for me is very similar to a feeling that everything is going to be OK. Those who know me know that I can be very cynical, sarcastic, and sometimes pessimistic when I am sad or discouraged (or even sometimes when I'm not!). So I in my case, this feeling of optimism, of peace, has to come from an outside source. I have found that when I realize that things are not left to my hands alone, that when I truly put myself in God's hands, when I let Him worry about it, that I feel peace. God is the only person, place, or thing that can give me real peace that has a lasting effect. This means that even when I can do nothing about my current situation, I try to not worry and acknowledge that God has a plan for me and this experience is a part of that plan. When I really am able to internalize that to some level, that is when I feel peace and I can keep struggling on, if that is what needs to happen.

It is true that when things are going well, I feel very good and peaceful with myself and with my life. When I feel in a good mood, it's easy to be at ease and happy. But, I have found, peace is not dependent on these conditions alone. One night earlier this semester, I figured out my finances, made a budget and weighed income against expenses. Despite having a job, I was quite discouraged when I saw how much money I wasn't making. That night, I sat outside for a while wondering how on earth I was going to survive college without going into debt or staying in school until 2022. I worried and fretted for a while and then got up and walked home. Sometime later, I can't even remember how much time had passed, I told myself that I was doing all I could to support myself financially and that God would take care of everything else. When I  really understood and believed this principle, that was when the peace came. That was when I just had the strong feeling that everything was going to be OK, so I didn't need to worry about not applying for a job that would pay more or despair over the 74 I had gotten on the biology test that I had truly studied for. I didn't magically receive enough money in my bank account to pay for my education. I didn't find 10 bucks on the sidewalk. But there was (and is) peace. Everything is going to be OK.

For me, that is what peace is. Here are some other quick thoughts that come to mind:

-God is never surprised or taken aback by what happens to us. He doesn't have to quickly pull together a new solution for the present problem. He is very much aware of what is happening to us and what will need to happen to us in the future in order to further our spiritual progression.
-Peace comes from obeying God's commandments. Period.
-We can find peace in the company of those we love and cutting ourselves off from them in times of trial or hurt of any kind can be detrimental to our recuperation and/or healing.
-Catastrophizing small things in our lives can lead to deep and unnecessary discouragement. I speak from experience.
-Endurance is an essential part of God's plan. But enduring for a lifetime is not a prerequisite for peace.

Like all people, I have trials in my life that make me wonder, "Why on earth is this my trial? Couldn't it be something else??" But what I have come to realize is that if it weren't "this," it would definitely be "something else." So, it might as well be "this," because the secret is that that "something else" would be just as hard as "this!" God knows what He's doing. He is not ad-libbing. After I think about those things for a few minutes, I think again about my trials. After I've mentally moved myself through that train of logic, believe it or not,  it brings me peace. There is no absence of trials in my life right now. And while I am not yet at the point where I am legitimately grateful for the trials I have, I know that there can be peace in the midst of them.