When you are in charge of making teenagers do things they would not otherwise do, you get apologized to frequently, very very frequently.

Sometimes it is in response to a raised voice, a sharp calling of their name. Sometimes in response to a raised eyebrow. Sometimes it is is seconds after they have done whatever it is they just did, which they know they are not supposed to do, but somehow they could not resist.

“I’m sorry” I hear it every day I think. “I’m sorry Ms. Norman” I’m really sorry.

Those words almost never means the repentance they promise to me. Instead that phrase means something else entirely. “I am sorry you caught me doing this.” “I am sorry this thing I am doing is against the rules.” Sometimes those words mean “please don’t punish me” or “please stop yelling.””Please don’t make me suffer consequences.” But rarely do they mean that anything is going to change. The offender has every intention of continuous offense.

Like an overused eraser on a worn  opening line someone is trying to get just exactly right, I’m sorry is often used until it rips through my patience and renders itself completely useless.

“If you were sorry you would stop” I tell the offender who has been caught/with his phone/talking to a friend/ late to class far too many times. “If you were sorry you would stop.”

Jesus doesn’t tell the woman at the well to feel bad about her behavior. He doesn’t tell her she must feel bad. He tells her to go and sin no more. He does not desire from her a weeping and wailing. He desires from her a changed heart, evidenced by a changed life style.

Coming face to face with Jesus empowers this women to change, not to feel bad, not to be sorry. I am coming to the conclusion that when face to face with Jesus, when confronted with my own sin, I have made the mistake of simply being sorry I do something. Sorry isn’t repentance. Feeling bad is not what my Lord desires of me.

He wants me to stop. He wants to empower me to go and sin no more. He knows the truth in the phrase I sometimes spit at my students in frustration. My changed life can speak for the change in my heart. If I was really sorry, I would stop.

I have finals to grade (why an essay test, Abby? multiple choice is your friend!) so of course I was surfing around on Pinterest as an avoidance technique. I justify it by claiming I am looking for good quotations or cheap posters to hang up in my room. Yes. Let’s go with that.

Anyway, I came across this one:

Somehow I don’t thin this is okay to hang in my classroom. But I definitely want it in my kitchen. I don’t have a ton of room in my kitchen to hang stuff….but I have got to get this up there. Because this is the answer to my funk.

I always think it is the school I am at, the fact that I am being surplussed, the pregnancy, the post-partum, that puts me in the funk. But I think perhaps it is simply the time of year. I am just so tired at the end of the year. I want someone to come through and throw me a freaking parade, you know? I want more fun and less work.

While I don’t think I really need less work. I certainly could use some more fun. And why not? If I want a parade. I am going to have to throw one. Get behind me folks, cause we are marching! Someone bring the kazoo. Anybody got any confetti?

Be thou my wisdom and thou my true word. I stopped to stare at those words on the screen as I attempted to coral the toddler and keep an eye on the baby, who has this week developed a most hilarious sense of humor. She was sitting in my mom’s arms and attempting to grab a hold of her aunt’s dress and lift it up simply because it makes her grin.

I love it when a hymn written origanly in old irish, translated to english in 1905, and “versified” in 1912 (I love wikipedia!) sings the words that my heart has been trying to form. My truest word…..what if everything I write that speaks to someones heart gets ascribed to Him? What if my truest words were the ones given to me, and not really mine at all. Every smart thing I think and say is His. Every good thing I see, I see through the eyes of Jesus.

Yes, let’s pray for that today, shall we? Me first.

Ms. Norman! Is screamed at me, hollered at me, whined at me, hello-ed to me, smiled at me, more often than the phrase “mommy.” I only have two children (currently) and only one of them talks. I have over a hundred students trying to get my attention at various parts in the day.

Currently my students are working on their projects while I am avoiding my grading by looking up the tattoo I think I want for my thirieth birthday on the internet. I may have a year and a half to work out the details, but you can never start researching too early! Especially when you are attempting to avoid grading your students final projects.

Every day I drive from the school where “Ms. Norman” is being hollered at me, to home, where I am greeted by a delightful squeal from my two-year-old “Mommy!” There is very little time to just be me in between, and who is that me anyway?

I don’t know what that answer is now, but I know what I want it to be. I know what I want inked on to my foot where I can look at it lest I get confused, and engraved onto my tombstone. I want to be a Jesus Lover. If you only get one sentence to eulogize me, I want it to be “She loved Jesus.” Mommy, wife, teacher, friend, I want to be good at all of those things, but mostly I want to be a Jesus Lover.

Now if I can only find the perfect font……

My oldest sister Emily wasn’t there for her 17th birthday. She was on a church ski trip. It was a sunday. The church that I grew up in was still small enough that we met in what is now the fellowship hall, but was the original sanctuary. I knew at least 95% of the faces in the service. I was dedicated and baptized in that space. So were my sisters.

At this point it is important to know that my dad was the crier in the family. If one of my parents was going to get all teary-eyed at a movie, we had our money on dad. I distinctly remember him crying over that Oreo commercial where the college age girl asks the dad to open up her cookie. Every single time it came on.

It was my mom that sunday who got choked up. She raised her hand during prayer request time and just wanted to publicly thank God for the blessing that was her oldest daughter on her 17th birthday. Later, I heard a woman I had known my entire life as the woman who brought the awesome cocktail weenies to the potlucks, and wore the fabulous sparkly shoes talking about how exciting it was when Emily was born.

That is the beauty of going to the same church your whole life, there are so many people who have walked every step of your journey with you. I have women who are my Facebook friends who can remember feeding me Cheerios and teaching me where my nose is.

She remarked how Emily’s birth was particularly sweet, after the bitterness of my mom’s first pregnancy ending in a miscarriage. It occurred to me that this woman had prayed with and for mom…before she was my mom. I knew somewhere in the back of my head that mom had a miscarriage before Em was born. We didn’t really keep secrets in my family. (Perhaps that is why I choose to spill my secrets all over the internet.)

Sometime after that, still in my early teenage years I asked my mom about it. She told me it was sad. She thought it was a girl and she named the baby Lea, an oldest daughter from the Bible. I found out from my dad, who freely admitted he perhaps did not realize how hard it was on my mom, that my Grammy came to stay and help take care of mom. My mom was in graduate school I think.

Sometimes I wonder about her, Lea. I wonder if she is the one who looks like Jill (my students at my first school  used to point her out among my sister pictures and say “that one got a different daddy?”), if she is the reason Emily does not often act like a first-born. I wonder sometimes if there would have been me had my mom not had a miscarriage the first time around. My parents did stop after three girls. I just wonder sometimes.

Mother’s day is coming up, and I read a really cool piece by Laura Zeisel about the word mother in the context of a verb. Mother Theresa may not have had any babies, but what a fine job of mothering she did for the kingdom of God. It made me think about all the people in my life who have, who are, mothering well.

Mostly, it made me think about my friends who have suffered through the pain of miscarriages. Within the last year I have found women like Laura Zeisel and Sarah Bessey, who blog about their miscarriages openly. I have discovered that many of my friends also, share their story. Positive pregnancy tests….but no joyful Facebook status celebrating babies arrival, no baby toes to coo over. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. Statistically speaking one in four pregnancies ends in miscarriage. Most of my friends are of childbearing age. It is happening. It is happening to my friends and sisters in Christ….and I don’t know how to talk about it. I am awkwardly silent on the issue. And I am not silent on much.

I am silent because I don’t want to offend or say the wrong thing. I am silent on this like I was silent on race, before my minority students gave me the words to use. I am silent because I know not everyone has the same way of dealing with their grief, and I don’t want to make any assumptions. I am silent because I just don’t know what to say.

I found out that a friend from church has had 2 miscarriages and I ponder the conversation I had with her sometime around the Peanut’s birth, when I asked her when her and her husband wanted kids. She smiled, and told me graciously that they were open to whatever God wanted for them. I am an idiot, and I pray that my idiocy did not cause her pain.

I attended a poetry reading by some old speech circuit acquaintances. One of the poets preformed a beautiful poem about her miscarriage. (She wrote a book with said poem in it, you should buy it.) It had the line, “what we do is the same.” She had two miscarriages in the same time that I had two health babies. She is honoring those babies the best she knows how, just like I am feeding and clothing my babies the best I know how, and I meant for it all to come out gracefully, but per my standard behavior I verbally barfed all over her. She handled it beautifully and I was able to redeem myself in a Facebook message.

My track record for talking about miscarriage is clearly not great. But I wanted to say, in this tiny space I have here that I am thinking of you this mother’s day. I want to hear your story and honor that life if you would allow me to. I want to weep with you and hold your hand if you want to cry. I want you to be less alone. I want to make sure you know that God is not punishing you, and this is not your fault, and all the other lies that sometimes people believe in grief are in fact lies. I want to stand with you, or sit with you, or be silent with you in solidarity.

I don’t want to stand in the desert and talk about how it really should rain, how it used to rain here all the time and now it is not and if it would just rain again then everything would be okay. Don’t get me wrong. I am praying for rain. I am standing in the desert praying that the Lord would make it rain. Make it rain justice, and mercy, make it rain grace and peace. Lord make it rain! And I think He can, and I believe He will. I will listen for thunder and sniff the air, I will smell the hope of rain.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t grab a shovel and start digging. Yes, I want it to rain, but that isn’t the only way for water to come. Mercy and justice can also spring up from the ground and that is just as miraculous.

I will stand where the Lord has lead my heart, I will bring a shovel, and I will start digging. I will trust that the water will spring up from the ground, and I will dig. I will pray for rain, and I will pray for the strength to keep digging. I will join others as they begin to dig.

I will notice the wells that have already been built and I will dig with my brothers and sisters to widen the well, so that more water might pour out. And I will continue to pray for water.

I am no longer willing to live in the land of swimming pools and freshly watered lawns and contnue to be willfully ignorant of the deserts of my brothers and sisters. I will take my water to them, pour it out for them, and aid them in digging their own wells. I will turn off my hose when I have enough, so that others can also have enough, so less will go thirsty. I will pipe my water into their community. I will give both a shovel and a glass of water to those in need.  And I will pray for rain.

But I will not stand in a desert and lament that there is no rain; I will not blame the thirsty for their lack of water while I stand in my shower and let my water run over me just because I can. I will not see my full well as a sign that I am doing it right, and the thirsty are doing it wrong. I will pray for their rain, and I will join them in digging.

I will pray: Lord make it rain, and Lord allow the water to spring up from the ground. I trust where you put my heart. I will sniff the air and smell the rain, and I will put my hands to the shovel and I will dig. I will trust that the water will come, and I will find those desert places, and I will bring my water, and my shovel, and I will trust that the water will pour out.

A childhood friend has been writing a series on some desert places she has discovered, way to pray for rain and people who already have shovels. I found todays post on AIDS particularly moving.

Over at sheloves magazine everyone seems to have a word of the year. They all seem so exciting and adventurous. Fearless! Leap! Roar! They are big and bold and active.

And my word for this year, my word is grace. I have known it since New Years Eve. This year is all about the Grace of the Lord. Resting in it, admitting that I am not good enough, trusting that the Lord’s grace covers the rest. Accepting grace from others in the form of a surprise cherry-limeade, a message on facebook that what I write matters, an email exchange from women I really only know through their blogs, or dinner I did not have to cook or pay for. It is hard to accept help sometimes, even harder to ask for it.

I am also learning a whole heck of a lot about extending grace. To myself, to my family, to my friends. Grace isn’t grace if it is only extended when someone deserves it. That isn’t grace at all really. My self-centered form of justice says that if I was wronged in anyway I deserve to withold grace. Forget that forgive us our sins as we forgive those who have sinned against us thing, I want to see someone truly repent first.

How many sins would be left still clinging to my being if the cross only covered the things I am consistently repentant for? Too many to count, more than I am aware of I am sure. And yet, that grace was extended anyway. I am learning (slowly) what that means to give grace freely, because I still believe what I expressed earlier this year Grace gives people the freedom to move on, the space to do better. It allows people to move past where they were and move to where God calls them to be.

In some ways I am jealous of those women with big active words for this year. I am the kind of person who leaps before I look, roars with the best of them, charges ahead and hopes that it will all work out it the end. Those are all things I am good at, they suit me. But those are not my words this year. The word of my year is grace. And grace is less of a one time big action, or an attitude, and more of a day to day discipline, a moment to moment surrender. And I am learning to give myself grace when I fail…..at grace…. Goodness gracious!