Dear Providence, You're Doing It Right

I love my school.  Have I mentioned that before?  I LOVE it.  It's funny to think how worried I was this summer about how they were going to be too conservative or that they would hate me or that I would hate them and blah blah blah.  I love it, and I want to work there for a long time.  We'll see what God's plans are for Rex and I next year, but I pray that they include keeping me at Providence.

One of the things I love about Providence is that they keep their priorities straight.  You can see it in everything they do:  God is #1, family is #2, and everything else in life trails far behind those two things.  I could wax on for hours about how they espouse these values on a day to day basis, but I'll spare you the novel.  I just want to talk about how they celebrate Christmas.

In every school I've been in previously (both as a teacher and as a student), the day before Christmas Break is a day to party and have fun.  We generally eat a lot of cookies, watch a Christmas movie, and do some sort of gift exchange.  You know the drill.  At Providence, they have a tradition of using the day before Christmas break to spread Christmas cheer to people in the community.  They see it as an opportunity to be selfless rather than selfish and to show students what it looks like to care for others.

The day began with splitting up into "teams" to go visit elderly people who live alone and don't have a lot of family around to visit often.  This is directly in line with the Bible's teaching to care for widows and to learn from the wisdom of our elders.  My car went to visit a woman named Netty.  She is 80 years old, and you could tell she had really been looking forward to having us.  She had fresh pumpkin bars made and juice to drink.  She told us all about when she immigrated to the United States at age 20 because she followed the man she loved even though she didn't know when she would get to see her family again.  She talked about her adventures with her husband in Indonesia, China, and a million other places.  She talked about the joy of raising their kids together.  She talked about the sadness when he passed away in 2000 after 46 years of marriage.  It was a fascinating story, and it was so good for the students (and me) to look at the theme of God's love and providence over the span of this woman's whole life.  I'm sure it was good for her to have visitors.

After the home visits, the junior high met up again at an area nursing home, where we sang Christmas carols and read Bible verses to the residents there.  One ornery old guy had a playground ball that he kept throwing at us from his wheelchair, but that was really funny and the kids kept throwing it back at him (not too hard, don't worry).

After the nursing home visit, each car of students got to choose where they wanted to go out to lunch.  My car chose Subway, which was fun.  It was a blast to sit down with four of my students and have fun together away from the pressures of school and homework and assessments.  It was so funny to talk about our first impressions of each other.  I thought they were sheltered and weird; they were worried I was going to be boring and incompetent like their last teacher (their words, not mine.  I'm sure she was lovely).  We all agreed that actually we all ended up liking each other quite a bit and that we're glad it all worked out the way it did.

Once lunch was finished, we went back to the school for a Christmas chapel and then a Christmas sing-a-long where the families of the students came to school to join in singing Christmas carols.  I held someone's baby during the sing-a-long, which was funny because I'm not inherently that mother-y and I was positive that I was going to make the baby cry during the program and embarrass myself by having to go across the entire gym in front of the podium to give him back to his mom.  Fortunately he was a good baby. *phew!*  We made it through the program unscathed, and I was quite relieved when his mom took him back.  She said, "You're going to be a great mom someday," and I just laughed nervously and mumbled out something along the lines of "Thanks" and refrained from adding, "That is so not going to happen."

All in all, it was a great day.  I think that the school's message of looking outside yourself and providing for the community is a great thing to focus on.  I wish more schools would do that.  My school would be basically perfect if only I could wear nail polish...  I may or may not have gone with one of my teacher friends to get manicures immediately after school today.  Two weeks of painted nails ahead!  Paaaartay!

Yay for the true meaning of Christmas Break - community service and sparkly nails.