Today

Today, the kids were @#$%!ing nuts.
Today, I feel like a complete failure as a teacher.  (How's that for vulnerability?) 
Today, I feel like the kids hate me.
Today, I hate that I yelled at them.
Today, it sucks that they were so, so disrespectful and ridiculous.

There are a lot of days when my job totally rocks; there are many days when I can truly say I love what I do.  ... but ...
Today, my job sucks. (Because the kids were ridiculous and terrible, and because I sucked, too). 

On Faith and Doubt

"Those who believe they believe in God but without passion in the heart, without anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, and even at times without despair, believe only in the idea of God, and not in God himself."
- Madeleine L'Engle 


"Just as the Christian has his moments when the clamor of this visible and audible world is so persistent and the whisper of the spiritual world so faint that faith and reason can hardly stick to their guns, so, as I well remember, the atheist too has his moments of shuddering misgiving, of an all but irresistible suspicion that old tales may after all be true, that something or someone from outside may at any moment break into his neat, explicable, mechanical universe. Believe in God and you will have to face hours when it seems obvious that this material world is the only reality: disbelieve in Him and you must face hours when this material world seems to shout at you that it is not all. No conviction, religious or irreligious, will, of itself, end once and for all this fifth-columnist of the soul. Only the practice of Faith resulting in the habit of Faith will gradually do that." 

- C.S. Lewis Religion: Reality or Substitute

"Most people are bothered by those passages of Scripture they do not understand, but the passages that bother me are those Ido understand."
-Mark Twain


“You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet.  That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me.  In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England."
-C.S. Lewis Surprised by Joy

I'm an old soul.

Things I like: 

• Jazz music
• Coffee after dinner 
• Reading the real newspaper in the morning
• Sitting on the porch
• Listening to NPR
• Living room and dinner table conversations without iPhones, computers, iPads, or TVs
• Swing dancing
• Grandparents
• Sharing stories
• Tire swings
• Walks
• Modesty
• Knowing my neighbors
• "Yes ma'am" and "Yes sir" 
• Frank Sinatra
• Simplicity

I am an old soul.