Gifts

USING OUR GIFTS IN THE WORKPLACE

A Testimony for Sacred Space 9/26/10

New Hope Covenant Church

I have been working at Life Academy of Health and Bioscience, a small public Oakland high school, for the last six years. I teach math, all grades, and then dance class for a few weeks at the end of the year. Kids are always shocked by this, but these hips don’t lie. I chose to go into teaching based on my convictions about working towards justice and restoration in the lives of disadvantaged youth, and to just build and restore confidence and self-esteem through math, and, after the shock, dance.

Also, teaching came out of an exploration of the gifts and natural talents that I thought I had. Once I figured out what those were – I like creating things, presenting things, I think I’m good at making people feel comfortable - (I’m still figuring out others), I committed myself to stewarding the gifts and skills that I have for the sake of the gospel.

But in the day to day it’s rough. I know all the teachers in the house probably feel like the only days it feels worth all the effort, stress and hair loss are at the end of the year, when kids get more sentimental and realize the impact you’ve had on them all year. If only every day could be more full of gratitude and less of hair loss, my job would be the best job in the world.

I think when I first started I was full of zeal and passion for my ministry. Yes, I saw teaching as a ministry. I was loving my students and trying to help them be successful and breakout of cycles of injustice. I walked in to my classroom knowing Jesus was there before me. But the longer I taught the more I was exposed to the depth of need there was in my students – right here in Oakland. And the needs are deep. And the problems never seemed to go away. I began to be cynical about progress and disbelieving that there could be change. And without hope based on the power of God, my gifts lost their spiritual power.

I stopped praying in expectation; I only prayed in response to the crises that materialized every day. Even just this past week – probably one of the hardest weeks I’ve had in my six years – it was the reality of violence and death that led me to prayer rather than hope and vision for God’s kingdom. Of course there is a time and a place for us to fall on our knees and plead with God, especially when a student dies, but I think what I haven’t been doing is praying FOR God to work, ahead of time, in advance, inviting him into the equation. I have relied on my talents and my effort. I have only come to prayer when I feel like I can’t do enough or didn’t do enough – AFTER THE FACT.

When that happens – when you get better at what you do, you see results, and you attribute your successes to yourself and you own talents, work becomes just that, work. Just a job, not a ministry.

I’m coming to see that although God has created us with talents and gifts, if we do not use them with God’s purposes and intents in mind, they fall far short of their potential.

And I think it’s easy to rely on your gifts and talents and only turn to God when those don’t seem to be working. Friends, this is not what God intended. I want to see my gifts, all of our gifts, as FROM God and use those to motivate us in our day to day work; to go forth, in power and in love. Think about what a better teacher I would be if I prayed about how to use my gifts for the sake of my students, and if I saw how the person God made me to be was a part of a bigger mission, even in my workplace.

If we do not see our gifts as gifts from God, inspired by God, to be used by God, then our work will just be work. It is God who has equipped us, so we need to see the tools he has given us as more than we currently see them.

I’ve thought a lot about how we can support teachers and other ministry in the workplace type folks here at NH. I think the most critical thing is to pray together and support the intentional ministry that many of us do every day. We need to remind each other and rally together around a common mission, and affirm each other of the gifts we bring to those missions. I held one for teachers before the school year started and it was powerful to just know that James has got my back at Roosevelt, and Wendy is holdin’ it down in Berkeley, Jody in the district office, David and Angela and their principal power couple, and Shuli in the deep East, and all the others, not working alone but working together, toward a common goal to transform education in Oakland – not by our might and skills and talents, but transform it by the power of God, who yearns for justice to be restored. We need to pray, and keep praying together, and for each other, the whole church because, like my students demonstrate so well, it is oh so easy to forget what has been given, and what promise it has…

bayup 2010 reflections

June 30, 2010
10:50am

I’ve finally settled on an answer to my question.

During the last five years of incarnational living in Oakland – teaching math in the ‘hood and living alongside my students – I often asked myself, “Would my life be different if I were living anywhere else?” The inquiry, I suppose, a rhetorical one.

BAyUP is just 10 days old and all I have done is moved down the street from where I live. It feels like a different world.

It is one, through sheer intentionality, where I am expected to meet my neighbors and expected (even moved) to pray for them and for the city – one where simple living means living simply. It is a six-week world where food and water is precious and each drop and morsel is considered. It is one where community is communal, and everything we have is a gift from God.

This is certainly not the Oakland I had been living in, despite it being just two blocks away. My neighbors were just daily hello-how-are-you-doings. My prayers stopped at me, and simple living lost out to simple entitlements. It was a comfortable Oakland, one without need, and a comfortable me.

The answer, then, is no. My life would not be different if I were living somewhere else. Not because it’s the city that makes my life different, but because I have made the city so.


July 3, 2010
I met Tim at the World Impact Community Breakfast. I saw him eating alone and just decided to sit down and say hello. Tim was hungry. And he knew the food distribution schedules in Oakland so well that he intended to make the most of this free breakfast. It would have to hold him over to the free dinner at the Catholic Church later that evening. I had a vested interest in this free meal conversation, seeking a free Fourth of July barbeque myself!

It was a bit awkward at first, chatting about charity meals and the abundance of it around Oakland, but I just tried to be as hospitable as possible, refilling his coffee and getting him seconds and thirds. We quickly established some rapport, and when another BAyUP student joined us at the table, God was suddenly there.

The conversation quickly moved to deeper pain and brokenness in Tim’s life. (Those students are so gung ho!). Tim is a crack cocaine addict with a desperate desire to be clean but relapses with every hardship of a life of homelessness. He shared about the spiral of events that first sent his life into drug addiction and interjected comments about the loneliness that he felt pervaded his existence. He has tried to commit suicide several times in the past few months, believing that he is unloved and unworthy of receiving love. Tim was starving.

We challenged him to try God and we affirmed him in his worth. We told him about God’s deep love for him and prayed for him to see it in the next few days. I trust God will not disappoint.

Ironically, when Tim left on his way to his next free meal, I could only hope and pray that his hunger be deepened – not for free food and watered down coffee but for the satiating love of God.


July 14, 2010
During a study of the Book of Amos, we took a time of lamentation to process some of the things we had been hearing and learning about God’s views on injustice in the Old Testament. I grabbed a cup of coffee and headed outside to talk a walk.

The moment I exited the gates of Harbor House Ministries, I was overwhelmed with what I saw – an ugly house with an ugly lawn on an ugly street. I looked around and reeled at the ugly neighborhood around me. I felt it in my soul – the ugliness of the world and the things that filled it. As I kept walking I stumbled upon a pile of trampled grapes plastering the concrete sidewalk, rotting. I looked up above me to see just a few remaining beautiful and plump fruits on low hanging branches, awaiting their turn.

Everything was revolting – the feeble human attempts to make beautiful what was inherently ugly, the reality that what we humans have created is so far from the beauty God intended, the sadness of marred perfection.

When I went back to the study, another staff worker said lamentation was a discipline of feeling what God feels. It must be so. God perhaps feel deeply saddened, maybe even repulsed, when he sees the ugliness of what we have done with His world. And sadder still when He witnesses our disregard for it.

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The next day our team went to Allen Temple, a large, largely African-American church in deep East Oakland. As the gospel choir sang and celebrated God, I was nearly moved to tears with the opposite feeling (tears = Fred rarity). I felt an overwhelming sense of joy and relief, starkly contrasted to the disgust and hopelessness I felt the day before. Here I was, with hundreds of others, singing and worshipping and praising God all together, also as God intended. God perhaps feels overwhelmed with love when we pour ourselves out to him in community. He perhaps delights in our understanding that Jesus is restoring what we have made so corrupted. The beauty then, is that there is restoration, and ugliness is but a temporary state.


July 30, 2010
I turned in my monograph today (a master’s thesis) and have completed a second master’s degree. On the drive home I thought about the Kingdom of God, and how we are called to pursue it, and about how, really, there should be nothing more that we vie for. Are the things that I am doing in the day to day really a pursuit of the Kingdom of God? Why is it so easy to get distracted? Why is it so easy to forget that our first love and our chief aim is building God’s kingdom?


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On Teaching
During the last day of Trek debrief, Amanda, the BAYUP director, summarized a major theme of the program – that as Jesus is restoring shalom in us, He is restoring it in the world. Our healing and restoration is a part of the world’s healing and restoration. It is exactly the connection between social justice and personal holiness I have been searching for.

As I listened to those words and to people’s testimonies about the summer, I suddenly had clarity about this entire past year. My decision to leave teaching and go back to grad school, and ultimately to staff a BAyUP team, seemed to make sense. I left teaching last year partly to pursue other career opportunities, but in large part because my personal life of faith was crying out for restoration. After four years of teaching in the inner city, I think that my job just became a job to me and I began to deal with the stresses of school in unhealthy ways. I drank a lot, was negative and cynical, and what was supposed to be a ministry of love became devoid of the prayer and holy intention it began with. I got better at teaching, and I attributed it to myself. My students and school improved, and I saw it as the work of my own hands. My ‘ministry’ was not really a ministry at all.

This summer, working at Camp Fire in West Oakland, I felt as if I relived my first year of teaching all over again. My team was essentially in charge of running an entire summer youth program – 7 hours a day, 5 days a week, curriculum and logistics and all. Being a secular organization, much of the work felt very similar to the work I do at my school: the stresses of planning and classroom management, the pains of working with students from such broken backgrounds, even the pleasures of seeing a light sparked or some confidence gained in one of our students. I knew these feelings well.

It was what I did with them that restored me. As Amanda shared, I began to see how the specifics of this summer experience at Camp Fire was what I had been wanting and missing in my teaching career, how it was the mirror of what could be. Whereas I have sought out comfort in alcohol or used complaining to vent as a classroom teacher, I spent the summer instead praying for my students, and praying for our program. I did this with a team that shared a missional heart and was predicated in hope. We prayed each night, and God worked. We prayed again, and God worked. I began to see the power and potential for prayer, in community, for my work and ministry.

As Jesus restores shalom in us, He is restoring it in the world.

Going back to Life Academy this year, I will be such a better teacher. Maybe tests scores won’t improve and maybe the days will be just as tiring and tedious as they were before, but at least my students will have a healthier teacher. They will have a restored one who is not turning to harmful things to cope. They will have one who is more wholly pulling God in to the picture, and one who is praying for them in hope rather than out of reaction. And in this, maybe their shalom shall too be restored.

tenemos lo que tenemos

i was in line at peet's the other day and i overheard something in spanish behind me:

senora: [big sigh] tenemos lo que tenemos.

we have what we have.

i'd have to say that this year has been anything but that. after fours years of it being all about my students in Oakland, and eye-opening experiences in cambodia, and the work of justice in both of those places, this year has just been about me wanting more and me working harder towards getting it.

i don't regret my decision to go back to grad school. i think it is a much needed break and is giving me some time to think about life and calling in a different way. but i do regret that a lot of this past year has been about the pursuit of things i thought i had stopped pursuing. i even applied to a couple of doctoral programs to keep the door open for dr. ngo (c'mon - i'd be Dr. Ngo!!!). [it's a good thing i did not get in because it would have been very hard to say no]. i have been stressing out about how to get to where i think i want to go and even worse, where i think i deserve to go.

sometime this year i unearthed the entitlement demon - the one that makes you think that you are of untouchable grace and deserving of blessing (see jesus in the wilderness). because i went to a great school and have reserves of human capital, i somehow think i am deserving of something more.

i have lost my way.

waiting for a return to when i have what i have, and that is enough.

luke 5

i am about 60% ready to go back to teaching. i left because i was becoming less and less like the person i wanted to become.

i've been realizing that this is not an external battle that i need to fight (placing blame on teaching for burgeoning cynicism, substance abuse, and fraction-alization of my core); those things are still happening, and i'm on what seems like the longest vacation ever. the fighting is less frequent, for sure, but the tendencies are still there.

what it is is an internal battle of character and integrity - one which forces me to confront my core and turns me from the distractions of my periphery. i can't blame school or my students or the system for everything difficult; i'm the same wherever i am, and that is the frightening part. without relentless introspective work, i won't be who i want to become; and the reason for the failure won't be the circumstances, it will just be my own doing.

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Church was awesome today.

Why do I wake up to gunshots at 3am, sigh momentarily, and then go back to sleep so quickly? Why do my one-day-a-week work days at Life (and pretty much the last 4 years there), where I am face to face with the needs of students and teachers and a hurting city, feel like a just a job?

I realized today that it's because we become accustom to the normal. After four and a half years in Oakland, all of it - the violence and the fear and the chaos - has become normal, expected, unshocking. I expect nothing different, and it is because I believe nothing different is possible.

Have we forgotten what God can do? What God is capable of? Have we expected nothing from Jesus?

I do not want to live in normality and be devoid of reaction. I want to expect miracles and majesty again. I want to know what awe feels like again.

because you say so, I will cast down my nets.