Fears and perfect love.

I sat in the small, dimly lit room containing roughly ten of my peers during my senior seminar class this week. Exhausted and defeated, deflated and slightly rejected. By myself, my doubts, my fears. Without even knowing it, too. Soon enough, my professor was telling us to take out the same paper we covered each week and start the hour of our time with writing, just as we did every week. I followed directions just as I expect my own students to do and mindlessly took out my pen.

"This week we are going to write on our fears."

I heard her level voice say quietly just over the silence of the white noise of the radiator and the other ten exhausted student teachers in the tiny conference room. 

Immediately, my mind snapped to attention and my heart spooked like a racehorse shot from a gate. I stared at the blank white walls, at the other twenty-somethings in the room, at my blank paper and at the pen in my hand. I knew what I was supposed to do. I was given the directions. And I most certainly have more than enough fears to write about, but my heart and my mind screeched for me to stop. To not share. To not open my mouth and my heart, to not dare move that pen for one second onto the paper. To keep my fear comfortably yet so intoxicatingly shut up inside of me. Looking around at everyone else in the room as they wrote furiously in the allotted time, I shifted my eyes from the pen in my hand to the blank paper in my lap and connected them hesitantly and vulnerably. 

"I am fearful that..." I wrote. 

"I am fearful that I am not enough." I finished.

And like an opened box filled with helium balloons my fears floated out from inside of me, from where I had been storing them tightly away. My eyes immediately shifted around the room to make sure no one else's eyes could mysteriously read over the top of the angle that my paper was being held. My paranoid heart lurched back with the reality of my fears, now written on the paper in my lap

"I am fearful that I am not enough. That I am not doing enough, being enough, teaching enough, helping enough, for my students. I am fearful that their misunderstandings are always my fault and that their failures are the direct result of my teaching or poor teaching.

I am fearful that I am not good enough,

not quick enough,

not skilled enough,

not enough."

I finished furiously scribbling on my paper as my professor's voice hummed on in the background like a forgotten television in the corner of a busy family's living room. Something about putting down our pencils and talking out. Something about who would be willing to share their fears. People are me, my peers who I had been with for almost four years now started sharing what they had written. To my surprise I was not the only one with fears, with the same type of fears about myself, about being good enough, being enough, or could I even do this? "Once you start caring about your students in your fears, you are truly a teacher." My professors voice echoed through my thoughts. "Once you start thinking of them in the foreground of your concerns, of your thoughts and of your teaching, you are there. You are making yourself better for them. You are a teacher." 

Maybe that means I am a teacher. Or that I am heavily on my way to becoming one. After all, isn't that what this education is for? All this hard work? All these hours working in the field? These lesson plans and assignments? But it's more than that. It's the feelings. The passion I feel. The way I feel when I can help one of my kiddos, or when they choose to come to me for help. The way I feel after I have to have a 'stern talkin' to' with them and they apologize and mean it, or the way they are so eager to share an irrelevant story with me first thing in the morning before they have even set down their bags.

"There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love." 1 John 4:18. 

I like the way The Message translates part of this verse. "There is no room in love for fear. Well-formed love banishes fear." I love what I do, I love what I'm becoming, what I am continuously learning how to do. I certainly still have a lot of learning. But maybe I should focus more on loving what I'm doing, which in-turn comes across as loving my kiddos, loving why I'm doing it and why I am called to do so. In our class, we have been talking about that this isn't just some regular education course, this is our calling. We didn't simply decide one day, "hey locking ourselves in a room full of high-energy students who constantly demand our love, instruction and attention for eight hours of the day every day, sounds like a great idea." No. What are you, crazy? Who thinks that stuff?

We, I decide this because God called me to it, He made me for it.

Because I am capable of the love, not crippled by the fear.