“There’s no other heart like yours waiting to welcome me home.” – Regnum Christi Music Collective

Shortly before I left Sanderson, I commissioned a mural to be painted in my classroom. The mural was inspired by the novel The Marrow Thieves, a post-apocalyptic young adult novel about Native Canadians that centers around themes of found family, identity, dreams, and home. In one of the novel’s pivotal moments, an Elder speaks to the main character in their native tongue. “Kiiwen,” she says. You must always go home. Unbeknownst to me, who selected this word for my wall simply because I loved the novel, kiiwen became my refrain as I entered the halls of my alma mater. The reality of kiiwen was never more obvious to me than this school year. I went home—and I will never go back.

“Welcome back!” – Cardinal Gibbons Alumni Association slogan

Teaching at Gibbons was, in my mind, my dream job. I loved the school as a student and my memory of teachers there was one of adults who were excited, loving, passionate, and intelligent. I remember kind administrators and a school culture filled with genuine fun and a deep love for others. While my time in high school was by no means perfect (mainly because being a teenager comes with serious growing pains), none of that had to do with the school itself. While teaching at Sanderson, I joined the Gibbons alumni committee for several years and stayed in contact with former teachers. My love for Gibbons never wavered. For a long time, however, I didn’t plan on applying. I fell in love with public education—until it broke my heart. It was time, my husband and I decided last year, for me to go for the dream job. You, my dear readers, know what happened next. I think the question one might now ask is “So, was it everything you wanted? Was it really the dream job?” Yes, it was. Yes. Yes. Emphatically yes.

At first, to be honest, I was a little twitchy. The job was almost too perfect, like where were the flaws at this place? People were ridiculously nice, administration was incredibly supportive, and the work-life balance was a dream. After years of being kicked around in public, I kept waiting for someone to pull the rug out from under me. In the notes app on my phone, I keep a quote from The Bear. Carmy is talk to Claire, and she says, “You’re waiting for the other shoe to drop?” And he says, “Yeah, that’s it.” Then, she says, “Wanna know a secret? No one’s keeping track of shoes.” For a while, I just kept telling myself that: No one’s keeping track of shoes. Eventually, I accepted that this school where I worked was actually just that great.

This acceptance of the fact that life was good was, surprisingly, really hard for me. It was a homily given by our chaplain on a random weekday morning that made me realize why. I couldn’t tell you what passage in the Bible he was speaking about (although I could probably guess) or anything else he said. I just remember him asking, “Do you really believe God wants good things for you?” In my head, I thought, “No.” And I was shocked by the immediacy of my answer, by my absolutely disbelief in a God who is, as the Bible says again and again, good. How had I become someone who didn’t believe in a central tenet of his character?

Each of my teaching blog posts have, in the past, featured something I’ve learned through the course of the school year. Most of the time, what I’ve learned is related to career development, work-life balance, or pedagogy. Now that I’m a decade in, I have a pretty solid mastery of the profession. It’s not that I can’t (or don’t) learn more; it’s just rarer for me to learn something significant enough to write a whole blog about. So, instead, let me tell you about what I learned personally (or, rather, spiritually) this year: God is so good, and He gives His children good things. You have only to ask.

This sentiment is all over the Bible. Matthew 7:7-8 records Christ saying, “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened.” Jesus goes on, in verse 11 (also quoted in Luke 11:13), to say, “If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!” There’s no shortage of this truth in the Old Testament either. Time and time again, God answers the pleas of His people by opening wombs, freeing them from the bonds of slavery, providing manna in the desert, promising a savior. Psalm 34:10 promises, “Those who seek the Lord lack no good thing.” Again, in Psalm 84:11, we are told, “No good thing does he withhold from those who walk uprightly.”

This might be a good spot to point out that I don’t believe the human definition of good and God’s definition of good are always on line. From our societal (human) perspective, good is also easy. We ask, how could good involve pain and struggle? However, the Bible makes it clear that good can be hard. Think of it this way: learning something new is incredibly hard. When you were in school, you probably took at least one difficult class, and you might have struggled. That doesn’t mean the class wasn’t good; in fact, it probably means the class was pretty great. It made you think, caused you to grow. This is what challenges in our life do: force us to grow closer to God. James 1:2-4 says, “Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.” Therefore, good, in the Biblical sense, is anything God gives you that draws you to Him.

There are seasons in any Christian’s life that are forged by the flames of pain, by a near-constant and inescapable series of suffering. Recently, on a church retreat, when discussing the necessity of always abiding in Christ, one of the speakers said something to the effect of, “You cannot build a foundation in the middle of a storm.” What she meant was that steadfastness in Christ does not come from seasons of struggle. One does not, in the midst of a cancer diagnosis or being layoff, suddenly have the ability to trust Christ enough to survive. One must have been abiding in Christ in the easy seasons in order to build the type of foundation that does not topple when faced with difficulties. My job, this year, was an easy season and, readers, I was frantically building that foundation.

The foundation of my faith had been chipped away at by years of working an incredibly thankless and exhausting job, by personal medical difficulties, and by my own inability to find the motivation to invest outside church activities. By no means was my faith gone, but my foundation was wobbly. Suddenly, I had to become like Nehemiah, rebuilding a crumbling city by starting with the basics. Like Nehemiah exposed the returning Jews to the basic tenets of the law, I had to re-expose my heart to a basic truth of the faith: God is good, and He gives His children good things.

How does one begin to learn this truth? Prayer. James 5:13-16 makes it clear that prayer is our first defense rather than a last resort. He writes, “Is anyone among you in trouble? Let them pray. Is anyone happy? Let them sing songs of praise. Is anyone among you sick? Let them call the elders of the church to pray over them… The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective.” I prayed, and God said, “Watch this!”

God’s overwhelming kindness throughout this school year was healing and humbling. The Holy Spirit tugged at my soul with patience. The Lord soften my heart with the kindness of colleagues, the joy of students, and the peace of prayer. Every time I wondered if maybe everything was too good to be true, he repeated, again, “Watch this.” I asked for clarity, I was given wisdom. I prayed about missing former colleagues, and God both gifted me new teacher friends and provided a job at Gibbons for a former Sanderson colleague. My years of prayers to work for a school where I was supported and valued were heard. Even in my personal life, stressors were solved swiftly. Every time I turned around, it seemed like God was lavishing me with blessings. So often, I was literally brought to my knees in the face of such radical goodness. Part of me feels embarrassed for needing God to change my life so dramatically for me to understand His goodness, but I am forever grateful for His understanding, for knowing what I needed to be drawn closer, to build that strong foundation.

As humans, we are designed for home, for a place of belonging, somewhere where we are loved and valued. It’s literally how we were wired; God carved this desire into our DNA. Some of us are lucky to build or find a home on earth, but this world is ultimately unsatisfying. The reality is that earthly homes are imperfect, and our true “citizenship is in heaven” (Philippians 3:20). The wonderful goodness of God, however, is that he gives us glimpses of eternity in everyday life, those moments of pure joy and beauty and love that somehow transcend humanity. These moments should motivate us to “seek the city that is to come” (Hebrews 13:14). The ultimate expression of God’s goodness is that he opened the eternal home to us, and I am dumbfoundedly grateful for the small gift of this job–a job that reminds me, daily, of what’s to come.

–M