Lessons.

NOTE: There's a PG-rated word in #3.


Every New Year’s Day from the time I was 19 until I was 25, I took a few hours to think back over what the past year had taught me. I’d come up with a list that was as long as my age—19 lessons the year I was 19 and so on. I did it seven years, skipping it for the first time this past January. Because I am a sucker for fresh starts, I decided the beginning of the school year was a good time to resume my neglected tradition. But I’m not doing 26. Six is enough.

1.     When you reach out to people, they reach back. This summer I’ve made it a point not to turn down invitations. If it was possible for me to go, I went. I’ve gone out with larger groups than I’m used to, ridden in a race, reconnected with old friends, had long conversations with people I’d just met, and spent time with people I don’t know well. This may not sound like a big deal, but my introverted self has felt the growing pains. Luckily, I’ve noticed that when I leave my comfort zone and reach out to others, they meet me halfway.

2.     Worrying is a complete waste of time. This lesson came as a result of my exams and a friend’s wisdom. Knowing that it was the day before my writtens, my friend asked how I was doing. I had let worry consume me: my hair was falling out, everything I ate went straight through me, I couldn’t sleep, I was irritable, and I’d developed a slight tremor. My friend commiserated but then said, “Amie, the results of your exams aren’t in the hands of your examiners. They’re in the hands of the God you belong to.” I kept repeating that incredible sound byte verbatim in my head until it hit me that worrying was not only unnecessary but also at odds with my faith in God. My friend added in amusement, “80% of the stuff you worry about doesn’t happen anyway.” How true.

3.     Rubbing alcohol stuns fleas so you can pick them off your dog. My least favorite creature on the planet right now is the flea. Before I had a dog, I gave little thought to the pests. Now their tiny, insidious, jumping bodies send me into a flood of ire. I want to smash them with a hammer. It seems that after you treat your sweet puppy with FrontLine, all fleas should fall off, surrendering their weapons and cowering in fear. Not so. Word to the wise: if your dog is tormented by fleas, try alcohol. It makes those little jerks your bitch’s bitches.

4.     I am brave. I always considered myself a huge coward, and sometimes I am. But I did have the cojones to stick out a graduate program in French at a tough school. And I did go to France last summer, rent an apartment, and live in a city I’d never visited. And I do spend my days with 85 (and some days 101) needy, impressionable teenagers. I’m no John McClane, but I’m not the wuss I always told myself I was either. Yippee-kye-ay, y’all.

5.     Everybody screws up, and it’s no cause for alarm. We humans sometimes cause ourselves—and others—a lot of disappointment. A few weeks ago, a friend and I swapped stories about major screw-ups in the classroom. I told her about a situation I handled so poorly in my first year of teaching that I’m surprised the teaching gods didn’t break into my classroom immediately and shred my license. Although she agreed that I’d made a mistake, she said, “I guess the only thing left is forgive yourself.” Every day across the globe, our flaws lead us to do and say stupid things. And of course, we are free to judge, condemn, and gossip about people’s mistakes. But why do that when we’re all in the same boat? We’re all screw-ups. That’s why we need a Savior.

6.     People really know how to love. The epigraph to a book I read this year declared that we often tell ourselves a myth: that if people really knew us, they wouldn’t love us anymore. The fact is, however, that “if people really knew you, they could really love you.” All my life I feared my secrets, my mistakes, my flaws. For years they kept me from getting close to others: I believed that if someone got to know me too well, they’d see all the scum beneath my semi-polished exterior. The fact is that as I’ve trusted people more, not a single person has said, “Oh, I didn’t realize you did that. Eesh.” All I’ve been met with is grace and acceptance. It makes sense, right? The more we let each other in, the more opportunities we have to show each other love. And I can say with complete assurance that none of my friends or family could ever do anything to change my love for them. Love is about who a person is, not what he or she does or has done. If Jesus forgives and loves past the flaws, I have to make it my business to do the same.

Thank you to the numerous hearts in my life that make lessons learnable and life livable.

Groceries.

My students always used to ask what sorts of things were different in France. On the spur of the moment, it’s hard to come up with an answer like that. Like when someone asks you, “What sorts of movies do you like?” All of a sudden, you think, What do I like? Well, a couple of days ago something happened that I can cite as a definitive difference between France and America.

E and I went grocery shopping twice last week: once to the Sunday market for produce and fresh bread, and once to the store mid-week for everything else. Unfortunately, I’d already run out of produce when we went to the store on Wednesday, so I picked up some apples, cherries, and tomatoes to hold me over until Sunday. As is customary in France, for the surge of customers waiting to check out, there was one open cash register (and four closed ones [and a handful of unoccupied employees who weren’t about to get to work {which reminds me of a French comedian who said that Obama’s “Yes, we can!” slogan would never work in France. They operate more along the lines of, “No, we can’t!”}]). Anyway, when I finally got up to the front, I put everything on the little conveyor belt, just as one does in the States. Everything went smoothly until we got to the produce. “Il faut les peser,” the cashier informed me. Because I was flustered, I couldn’t catch the words, so I asked her to repeat. She did, and added, “Je vous attendrai.” Great, so I had to go back to the display where I picked up my produce so that I could weigh it, all the while with her waiting for me at the front with the other six shoppers in line behind me.

I had no problems with the apples or tomatoes, but I simply could not find the button on the scale for cherries. So that I wouldn’t hold anyone up any longer, I just pushed the “grapes” button and hoped for the best. Close enough, right? By the time I rushed back to the front where she was indeed waiting with the rest of my purchases, the line had increased by three more shoppers. I was so embarrassed about holding these people up for so long that I wanted to crawl under that produce display and become a troll as a cautionary tale for other unsuspecting Americans.

The weird thing is that no one seemed especially put off by my unintentional antics—and it was the middle of the afternoon on a Wednesday! They looked at me as though I were a fish in an aquarium. What is this species, one seemed to ask another in French eye language. Why is its face turning red? It appeared as though no one was really in a hurry. Certainly the cashier was not: she’d been talking to the customer before me about going south for vacation—the French get six weeks of paid vacation per year—long after she was done ringing up the woman’s purchases. The other potential cashiers were not in a hurry; they were instead ambling around the grocery store without a care in the world. Even the customers were more curious than frustrated. In America I would’ve been raked over the coals.

When Jeff and I had our neighbor F over last month, this same thing came up. I asked F what was the most surprising thing about America, after having grown up in Austria. He said, “It surprises me how quickly everyone moves in the stores. We move through the line fast, always. What if you love your customer and you want to say, ‘Your barber did a good job this week’? You cannot do it. You must just move, move, move.” Upon asking the same question to Professor B, a French professor from the region where we’re staying now, I was given the same response: “Why are Americans always in a hurry in the stores? If something takes awhile, we could just talk to each other in line, no problem. And what if we want to talk to the person who works for the store? But you cannot do it! We are rushed all the time.”

It’s a surprising thought.

But would it work in America?

Call it greed, call it capitalism, call it “making an honest living”…but one thing we hold dear in America is making money. I don’t necessarily mean that in a bad way. We want to take vacations to get away from the stress of everyday life, we want our children to go to highly rated private schools, we want to shop at Whole Foods or Greenlife so we get the cleanest food possible. Our lives require a lot of money. If we were to slow down in stores or in restaurants, we’d accommodate fewer customers, thereby bringing in less money. In France, for example, it’s common for a restaurant to fill up and then shut its doors for the night: patrons will stay from seven o’clock until midnight, lingering over bread, wine, and cheerful conversation. Would slowing down in this manner be worth the exchange we’d make? We would make a smaller profit, but we would know people better and perhaps, for that reason, benefit from increased national solidarity. Would racial anger begin to dissipate? Would religious extremism attenuate? Would we be physically healthier if we took things a little more slowly? Or would it make a difference at all? Perhaps we are too ingrained in our ways, too dependent on our money and independent of each other, for anything to change. After all, as a hardened introvert, I have trouble imagining myself talking to people for long periods of time at the grocery store or spending hours at the dinner table with others. Perhaps talking in line at the grocery store and lingering at the table wouldn’t make a difference. And we would probably have to give up the private schools and find other sources for the organic food.

I don’t think the French are wrong or the U.S. is wrong here, but perhaps we could benefit from each other. What’s the most important thing to get out of our lives, and how is the best, most balanced way to do it? I’d love to know what you think.

Proof.

The story of Jesus sounds silly, doesn’t it? It doesn’t seem logical that a Middle Eastern carpenter—quite literally born in a barn—could be king of the universe. Honestly, I don’t blame people who say, “You really believe that?” By the world’s standards, my faith doesn’t make sense. I also don’t blame people who want proof. Our party line as Christians seems to be, “Christian beliefs are based on faith, not proof.” And we like to quote Hebrews 11:1: “Faith is the confidence that what we hope for will actually happen; it gives us assurance about things we cannot see” (NLT). That works for us (presumably), but many want something more concrete. No scientific experiment exists that I can perform to definitively prove my beliefs, but there is something I consider my own personal proof: wisdom. This is a miracle, this is proof to me: when I consider all of the major decisions I’ve made in my life, I have yet to make a bad one. That has absolutely not one iota to do with me; I’m no wiser than anyone else. In fact, I’m comparatively less wise than many people on the planet. But every time I’ve had to make a life-altering decision, my heart has sought wisdom from God, and as a result, I haven’t regretted a single step I’ve taken.

The first such step I consider to be transferring high schools. That may not sound like an especially big deal to you, but it certainly was to me. The county high school was brimming with people I’d known since I was five years old; the city high school boasted a whole three people I knew: my next-door neighbor and two church friends. When you’re a profoundly introverted person like I am, the thought of going to school with 2,000 people you don’t know isn’t exhilarating; it’s terrifying. However, the city high school was more academically rigorous and fostered a much stronger drama program, so I made the switch in January of my sophomore year. God was with me in my new school: it was there I met the woman who’s been my best friend for over a decade, plus other wonderful people with whom I keep in contact. It was a difficult decision but undoubtedly a wise one, which is obvious when I look back. That’s something I can say for so many other decisions I’ve made that seemed irrational at the time: getting a teaching certificate instead of going to grad school when I finished college, etc. There’s been a reason every time, and God hasn’t let me make a bad decision yet. I don’t regret a thing.

There’s one decision for which I’m still waiting to see the wisdom. I double-majored in French and English in my undergrad: two supremely unmarketable degrees. Choosing those fields is counterintuitive on all accounts, but nothing else felt like the right fit. I just trusted God that he had put those talents and desires in my heart for some reason. Currently, I’m trying to earn a master’s in French, which doesn’t really solve the marketability problem…especially since French majors nationwide are being outsourced to France. The job market for French professors is decreasing, and, even though I knew that, I still felt that familiar pull that this was the right place for me. On top of all that, I perform much more agilely with English-language literature than I do with French. And yet somehow, despite all of that, I really feel as though this is where I belong. It’s that tiny little beam, like the faint green light Nick Carraway saw across the water’s surface, that I hang onto.

Yet, non-academic reasons for why I’m here are already revealing themselves. The University of Virginia provides state-of-the-art medical care, and for the first time, I’ve gotten answers about things going on in my body—answers I wasn’t even charged for. Also, living away from my hometown has been a bittersweet blessing: though it’s been unspeakably difficult to be hours from my family and friends, I’ve learned that I can thrive somewhere other than that one environment. Jeff and I have found a welcoming church home, a place we truly look forward to visiting on Thursday nights and Sunday mornings. Our church talks a lot about being genuine, compassionate, and full of grace—all qualities we have found in abundance in our small group. Even if I never saw any other returns on investment than the ones I listed above, the move to Virginia would’ve been worth it. Nonetheless, I still expect God to gloriously use my academic pursuits here in the future, even though I am blind to the possibilities right now. The convergence of what I know and what I hope for is my faith and my proof all at the same time.

I’m starting to feel that after the master’s it will be time to move on, and I just have to hope that God will be with me for the next step, too. He’s never let me down, never left me alone, never left my questions unanswered when it was time to reveal the reasons. I have no idea why I’m here, no idea why I majored in literature and language, no idea what the next step will be. For a planner like I am, that is exceptionally uncomfortable. But the never-failing love and grace of Christ is the safety net I cling to. That’s proof enough to me that my faith, my Jesus, is real. I’m not worried. It’s like one of my favorite moments in Charlotte’s Web. Wilbur, having been informed by the sheep of the fate of pigs on a farm, says to Charlotte, “Should I be worried?” She responds calmly, “Of course not. What good would that do?”