Wearing Out

*****I started this on Thursday, but didn’t finish.  I’m posting it today.*****

 

Today I had another teacher watch my last class for five minutes while I used the restroom.  When I got back, she asked me how I handled that class every day.

I admitted to her that I cry every day on the way home from school because of that class.

It’s not that they’re bad (they are, but they aren’t wretched), it’s just that it’s always something.  They were actually really good for most of today.  Then it exploded in the last minutes.  They are just so hateful to one another, and it breaks my heart.  I find myself so heartbroken over their anger, their meanness, and the awful ways that they speak to one another.

I had a phone call today that broke my heart.  It’s beyond words how terrible, terrible, terrible it was.  I still can’t believe it happened.  I thought I was going to throw up while I was on the phone.

These past weeks have just been so filled with heartache.  Those kids affect me, and they affect me deeply.

I need to learn how to separate myself from it.  But I just can’t.  Some nights I lie in bed and my heart just aches for them.  And do you know why?

Because they don’t know love.

They don’t know love.  Not the way that I know it.  I have the love of my husband, of my parents, my grandparents, my dear friends and family, and the love of a Savior.

Some of my students don’t know any of that.

Their relationships are based on physical desire, not love and compassion.

Some of them don’t have any sort of relationship with their parents or their family.

And most of them will find themselves betrayed by a “friend” more than once.

I know that if I lost everything in my life today, I would still have the Lord.  And that’s enough.

They don’t have that.

They don’t have anything.

And it breaks my heart.

So often, I find myself needing to cling to Romans 8. It gives me great comfort to know that nothing can separate me from the love of God.  That there is no condemnation for those in Christ.  So many days, I condemn myself.  I focus on my flaws, on my sins, and I can’t move past it.  It paralyzes me and  I feel so painfully inadequate.  But I know the truth—I know that Christ has died for my sins.  I know that I am accepted.  I know that God loves me and wants to work in me to make me more like him. 

They don’t.

And while I would like to tell you that I pray for them to know this every day, that would be a lie.  Sometimes I pray.  But often I focus on myself.  And the way their actions make me feel or act.  I don’t pray nearly often enough for them.

And I need to.  Because they need it.  And I could be the only one praying for some of them.

So now, as I am wearing out, as I am on the verge of tears 22 out of 24 hours each day, I realize that my focus needs to change.  I need to think less of me and more of what the Lord wants me to do for each of them.

To love them.

To pray for them.

To discipline them in love.

To be gracious, but firm.

And to be someone in their lives who genuinely cares about them.