Message from Jay Hendricks, High School Teacher

Annie Dillard, in her book An American Childhood says, “If I was so all-fired bright, as my parents, who had patently no basis for comparison, seemed to think, why did I have to keep learning this same thing over and over?”

Sometimes that seems to be the motto for my life.

“Surely there is not a righteous man on earth who does good and never sins.
Do not take to heart all the things that people say, lest you hear your servant cursing you. Your heart knows that many times you yourself have cursed others.
All this I have tested by wisdom. I said, "I will be wise," but it was far from me. That which has been is far off, and deep, very deep; who can find it out?”
Ecclesiastes 7:20-24 (ESV)

Anne Lamott says in Bird by Bird, "You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do."

Genesis 1:26-28 (ESV)
Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth."
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.
And God blessed them. And God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth."

Ultimately this is reassuring. Fortunately God’s standard exceeds mine for both perfection and grace, and I must remind myself daily that the cliché “God is not finished with me yet,” however trite, is true for me, my friends, my students, their parents, all who are in authority over me, people in general, even the idiot who drives so slow in the morning he makes me late for work.

I learn this lesson over and over when I come in contact with former students who drove me a little crazy but are now walking hand-in-hand with their children, and are pastors, and police, and firemen, and doctors, and social workers, and most unbelievable of all, teachers.