May I Remain a Nobody Worthy of My Calling

     Hello friends and family! I have not forgotten you nor have I given up on writing my blogs. I have been extra busy these last few weeks working on a couple different writing projects, as well as preparing my room where I will be teaching kindergarten starting this Monday. It is hard to believe that summer is over, but with this cooler weather, it already feels like September. I love listening to the crickets and frogs out my window at night, and the fresh, cooler air makes for great sleeping weather. I only hope and pray it does not heat up in September and fry us to the bone when we are in school!
     I am very excited to once again be a part of the Heritage Baptist Academy team this year, and I looking forward to an awesome year. All week I worked really hard to get the classroom set up and I am very pleased with how it came out. I will take a picture of it and post it later so you can see what I have done. After much cleaning and painting, it looks like a cozy, calming classroom and not some harsh, empty room that it was when we started.
     Last night we had parent/teacher orientation and I got to meet most of my students and their parents. It really struck me hard that this is reality...there is no going back now. All these parents are entrusting me to teach their children (six to be exact) and I do not feel worthy of this calling. I pray the Lord gives me great wisdom, strength, and patience to instruct these little ones, including my Benny. It is amazing how God orchestrates circumstances in our lives, molding and bending us to be able to perform something for Him later on down the road. There is so much happening in our family right now: new jobs, friends and family moving, trials and hardships of unspoken burdens...the list goes on, but like I mentioned in the last blog, the trials of yesterday give us hope for today.
    I had the privilege to sit with one of my friends the other night (one who told me they plan on moving far away some day, though it seems to be put off for the time being) in the rare quiet of not having any children around. I got to listen to her share her testimony with me, one of healing and the amazing  grace of God. As a sat and listened, I once again realized that my simple, plain life seemed so, well, so plain after all she said. I do not have a story of having to be pulled out of deep pit of sin so murky that all hope seemed to be lost. I did not go through a time where I felt like I just wanted to die and be rid of this life on earth. Yet, in God's eyes, I was no different to Him than she was; I was not any better. Even as a little girl of seven or eight years old, I still needed salvation just as much as she did, caught in the midst of  what seemed like hell to her. Yet, after all is said and done, I am really a nobody, with no story to tell, other than, "God saved me when I was  a child." I cannot go out and help others in the way that she can. She can whisper hope to ones who are in the same place she once was, and share with them that God loves them no matter what they did or are doing. He wants them to allow Him to take their hand and pull them out of the muck and mire, and clean them up to white and shining. But what can I do? I feel like a nobody. A naïve, simple, plain Jane kind of person...what do I have to offer? 
     The more I thought about this, the more I realized that God has a plan for nobodies in this life. He took many nobodies in the Bible and used them to do His work. Some of them let the power and position get to their heads, but many of them stayed humble and were mightly used of God. It is interesting how God always brings the latest thoughts that are going through my head to the pulpit and the preacher brings up the same topic, confirming what God has been speaking to me. Why, just the other night at church, the preacher talked about Hur, holding up Moses's arms as Joshua fought the Amalekites. Every time Moses held his arms up the Israelites would be victorious, but when he let his arms down, they began to lose. Aaron and Hur came up beside Moses and helped him keep his arms up the entire day, until the Israelites won the battle. We know a lot about Aaron, but we hardly know anything about Hur. He was a nobody. Yet, he was not afraid to get in and help where it was needed. I want to have that spirit. I want that willing spirit all the days of my life and never let it get to my head. It makes me think of the song:
Make me a servant,
Humble and meek,
Lord, help me lift up
those who are weak.
And may the prayer of my heart always be,
Make me a servant,
Make me a servant,
Make me a servant today.
 
So, as I begin this new school year, I pray that my heart remains soft and moldable for what may lie ahead, and that I am a willing servant to do what God has given me to do. Let the new school year begin!

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