As the holidays come to a close and winter enters the room with gust after gust of chilling winds, I am thinking about the kind of attitude with which I want to ring in this new year of 2010. Twenty ten. This number sounds the way a perfectly round donut would if it were thrown against a wall. Round and fresh. That is, if any sound could be heard beyond my hysterical shouting about wasting such a perfectly delicious donut.Mostly, I cannot stop thinking about compassion. This is not because I have a big heart. My heart is small and mostly covered with ice. A heart like this produces words that are blunt, sarcastic, and mean. Worst of all, sometimes I am proud of this, and parade myself around like some unstoppable, undefeated champion of rudeness, often confusing my snarky comments to be witty ones. Friends are too nice to tell me to shut up, and when they do I think they are teasing me.
A few weeks ago I met with a parent. She told me about how every day he comes home complaining about how much he hates school, also how much he hates me. My response: I'm not surprised. If I were him, I would hate school, too. This is no defense but my honest opinion about how this student is performing. I wonder now that it was perhaps a little too honest but at the time I thought it was a very objective. At the end of my little speech, she starts to give hers. It is a speech I feel as though I have heard before, details, defense and deductions about her child all the same, but at the end she proves me wrong. I have not heard this before and hope to never hear it again. She trembles a little bit, her voice a mixture of anger, worry, strength, and sadness, and says "Have a little compassion for him."
Have a little compassion. My heart sinks with guilt and shame. It was really sad to hear a parent request this of their child's first grade teacher, and it strikes a chord so deep in my ice, cold heart that it has played over and over again in my mind more times than there are donut crumbs. When I wake up, when I step into the classroom, when I get into bed... I am afraid that it will resonate with me for the rest of my life. I am also hopeful that it will.
So, here is the attitude. I want to be more compassionate. I know I have passion for teaching and for children, but I don't know that I exhibit compassion for them. Especially towards students who need good teachers the most... I am not going to tolerate my sinful personality anymore. 'I'm cold-hearted' and 'I'm just mean' are not acceptable. I cannot imagine facing Jesus and making those kinds of excuses, so I will not do it now.
I want to be a more compassionate person. I feel the need to say it over and over again. I don't know what this requires exactly. I feel the need to be a little bit softer, kinder, quieter even. But I am afraid that compassion will somehow diminish or crush the strength in me, strength the cross has given me, strength that has extinguished so many plaguing, stifling, toxic insecurities...
Then I remember the cross, really remember, and conclude that compassion most definitely adds strength to strength.
Remember the cross.
Watch out, 2010. I am ready to kill and destroy with compassion.(Or something nicer.)
