I am a teacher, and tonight – the night before school starts back – the honest to goodness truth is that right now I could not care less about how much English literature my students learn from me this year. After an encounter today with someone who just wasn’t very nice, it occurred to me that I would rather every student fail the End of Course exam if, in exchange, they could learn to be good people who do everything in their power to make this world better. I know far too many well-educated people who only make this world more difficult for others and leave hurt in their wake. What good is it to know lots of information if you don’t know how to love? Tonight, my lessons are planned and tomorrow I will teach English, but I will fail as a person and disciple of Jesus if I forget what really matters. So students, this is what I reallywant you to know.I want you to know that what you do and say to others really matters. I can remember something unkind said to me over 20 years ago, and I still have a scar from the wounds of his words....

I glanced in the rearview mirror today, and her shining eyes in the very back seat brought a lump into my throat.She is six now, heading to 1st grade, and I don’t know where the time went. I swear it was just yesterday that I brought her home in a preemie outfit that swallowed her whole. In the seat in front of her, big brother sits, his face losing baby fat as fast as he’s losing baby teeth. They are both big kids now, riding big kid bikes and reading chapter books, leaving me to shake my head and ask the age-old question, “Where did the time go?”It’s just one of the things no one can make you understand about being a parent.They can’t explain to you that seeing your wrinkly, red newborn for the first time will make your heart feel as if it will explode from the love that suddenly appears. They don’t tell you that the second time is just like the first.They can’t tell you that you will panic the first time they sleep through the night, though you begged for it for weeks (or months – they don’t tell you that either).No one tells you...

It’s almost here, fellow teachers.    Like it or not, we will wake up Monday morning much earlier than our summer sleep schedules are accustomed to, and we will walk back into the buildings we simultaneously love and fear. The newly waxed floors will look foreign without any tossed away papers and all used-up pencils, and the bare bulletin boards will mock us as we remember the cute ideas we saw on Pinterest.   We will make multiple trips from the car to our rooms, carrying bags filled with the magic we are convinced will make this year the best. We will stand surveying our rooms, hands on hips, as we envision a space that inspires and welcomes.   The plans will have to wait, though, as we sit through multiple meetings where we team-build and common-core learn and technology policy question… And don’t forget lunch-plans make, as this is the week – the only week – where we are allowed to leave for the sacred lunch.   Our non-teacher friends will roll eyes as we mention ‘heading back to work,’ and they will make snide comments about us having the whole summer off. We will roll eyes back as we mutter, “You just don’t get it.”...

Pastor José’s eyes were rimmed with red as we gathered at the front of his church. We had just finished painting his house, transforming a drab concrete building into a vibrant standout in his barrio. “My family – we gather every morning to pray, and we have prayed for a year to have our house painted,” he explained softly as the translator relayed his words. I dropped my eyes to the dirt floor of the “Jesus is the Way to Heaven” Church. I have just repainted my entire house, and prayer was not part of the process. The money was in the bank, the desire was in my heart, and that’s all there was to it. I wanted to, so I did.The humble pastor went on to tell us how his family has prayed for paint, but God did not allow for it until now. “Many people in my country think pastors are becoming wealthy,” he said. I wondered what they would think of American celebrity pastors as wealthy as our athletes. He told us of how just that morning God revealed to him a lesson about protection. He said that God kept them from having the money to paint...

Her brown eyes followed our van as we passed her on the bumpy road, looking through the windows at a dozen Americans conspicuously out of place in her neighborhood. We had come to bless a local Nicaraguan pastor by painting his house, a luxury for a man whose family can easily be without food. She spoke nothing to us, but I wondered what her words would be. What stories could she tell of living in such a place? Homes walled with black plastic sheeting; floors nothing but dirt. Garbage littering what passes for a road, leading to a neighborhood where children wander unattended and adults loiter because there is no job to be worked. I saw her for just seconds, but her face is on my mind tonight. She could be me.My natural reaction on any trip away from America is to pity the inhabitants of wherever I travel.“They just don’t know what they’re missing,” I think. Which is what? More electronic devices than there are people in the house? So much food that I toss expired bags full? So many channels to watch that I never have to converse with the people I love most?Maybe I’m the one who is...

Tomorrow is a big deal for the new Mrs. Scott. From this point forward, it shall be known as 'the day Jennie got on a plane on purpose for the second time in one summer.'Kind of catchy.The first time was to catch a cruise ship out of Puerto Rico for a luxurious honeymoon where someone else turned down my bed and made cute animals out of my towels. Sunday is to go to Nicaragua for a mission trip where bats are said to fly through the house I'll be staying in and where I will have zero access to a hair dryer or flat iron.So the trips will be slightly different.Other than the plane ride, I'm so excited I can't stand it. If I could just be beamed up like Scotty, all would be well. However, beaming up technology hasn't made its way to me yet, so I'll be forced to zoom through the air at 500 miles an hour in an aluminum can.Can I get some pills, please?Suffice it to say I'm not the best traveler. I have what might be called in some circles a slight case of the panic attacks. My poor new husband still bears the...

More than anything in this world, I want my children to seek the Lord. Yes, I'd like for them to do well in school and to choose career paths that are fulfilling and noble. I pray that they'll each find a lifelong love, and that their addresses will be no farther than a stone's throw away. I desire for them to know who they really are deep inside and what the passions that consume them are for. As all moms do, I have a laundry list of things I'd love for my children to experience. But more than all that, I just want them to know and love Jesus. The deepest desire of my heart is for them to desire Him.I want them to know what I know of His goodness, trust as I do in His provision, believe as I've come to in His faithfulness. I want them to revel in His Word, be consumed by His work, and devote themselves in His service. A struggle for me has been how to 'train up a child in the way he should go' while still ensuring that the choice is his. I don't want my children simply to follow in my religion;...

I may be a girly-girl, but I definitely love me some college football. While the Clemson Tigers are my personal favorite, I enjoy watching any team play. I follow several players on Twitter, and a few of them tweeted the same thing following their teams’ victories – “God is good!” From what I know of these young men, they really do seek to follow the Lord, but I wonder… Would their tweets have been the same if their teams had lost?We hear so often that ‘God is good’ when people are on their personal mountaintops, experiencing favor and blessing, lacking no good thing. But when life is hard, a barren wasteland of hardship and confusion, that statement is not as often proclaimed. Why? Do we associate our ease with God’s goodness? Tangible blessing with love?I agree wholeheartedly that God is good, but it isn’t in victory that I’ve learned it. I came to believe in His goodness – His eternal, unchanging, omnipresent good – in my personal time of defeat, a time when no good was being poured out on me. I saw His good when all else was bad.What do we even mean when we say He is good? You...

Like you, I am still in shock. Twenty babies were gunned down in their bright, cheerful school, innocently learning and unsuspecting of what was to come. Their faces haunt my thoughts, come to mind when I see the smiles of my own two children. I think of their parents’ grief and I weep, crying for their pain that I can never begin to understand. I see my children’s stockings and think of 20 that will never be filled. I watch my children’s chests rise and fall in peaceful sleep and know that there are parents who would give everything they have for just one more night. It doesn’t make any sense.How can a mother move forward when the children who grew within her will grow no more? How does a daddy walk past the bedroom where the child will never need tucking in again? How?It is more wrong than my words can express.In the midst of the sadness and need for understanding, one ray of light has shone. The teachers. We have all heard the accounts of their bravery and heroics, reading Christmas stories to innocents as bullets rained right outside. Finding crayons and coloring sheets to distract little ones while...

She weighed just five pounds the day we brought her home from the hospital, no heavier in my arms than a bag of sugar. She was born too early, five weeks before her due date, and had to learn to eat on her own before she could be released to our care. Her tiny hands were bruised from fluid-giving IVs, and her preemie outfits swallowed her whole. A feeding tube gave her the nutrition she needed when she lost the strength to suck, and each feeding became agony as we willed her to swallow just one more ounce.In those earliest days, when she cried nonstop and was so physically fragile, I prayed protection for my sweet girl. “Please, Lord, help her to eat. Let all of her systems be working as they should, and keep her safe from anything that might hurt her.” He, faithfully, answered those prayers.As she grew in size and strength, she still cried nonstop and never slept more than 3 hours at a time. She was so hard to soothe, needing to be held all the time, and her demands seemed, some days, more than I could bear. Her brother was not yet two years old,...