Sunday Morning Blessing

 

For from the greatness and beauty of created things

comes a corresponding perception of their Creator.

Wisdom of Solomon 13:5

Peace. Love, Linda

Miracle in the Classroom

When he walked into the classroom, I could feel the stuff inside of him oozing into spaces between the desks and under the wire book holders and up to the ceiling and into my stomach. I felt deathly ill, but I wouldn’t hold back Julius Caesar; it was a tenth grade rite of passage. I kept talking while he walked across the room in front of me, silently. A hush fell on the usually talkative class as they watched him with their eyes and watched me with their eyes and waited to see what my response to his tardiness, his crassness, and his obvious intoxication would be. I didn’t misstep. I swallowed my nausea and put back on my “isn’t Shakespeare amazing face,” and wrapped up my last stanza.

He sat down hard in his assigned desk, put his head on the table top and immediately passed out.  I rushed into action to see if he was breathing and called the office on the intercom to come to my room ASAP and bring the nurse. The assistant principal and nurse lifted him from his seat, draping him between them with his arms across their shoulders hefting him out of the room and down to the clinic.

The class totally dissolved then ended, and I went to the lounge for lunch still puzzling over the bout of nausea that swamped me when Paul crossed in front of me. I shared the story with the assistant for my sixth period drop-out prevention class. She was southern, a beautiful mix of black and white, and as Pentecostal as they come. After hearing my story, she had no doubt about what should be done. She called in reinforcement, and they walked into my classroom during fifth period planning with determined faces and spirit filled hearts ready for battle. They asked me if I would join them.

I’m tolerant and not particularly judgmental, so I accepted their desire to pray over Paul’s desk without compunction; however, when they asked me to participate, I felt a bit awkward. My dry Southern Baptist upbringing cringed as it walked over to the desk and timidly took the hands of two devout prayer warriors. I joined hands as we circled Paul’s desk and a triumvirate was formed. It was too late to back out, but I still had my decision making faculties, so I decided to be quiet.

They took turns praying aloud over the desk. They rebuked the devils, not just one devil, but every kind of high school, troubled child devil I had ever imagined. Suddenly, my assistant started making unusual clicking noises. Her sister in battle began speaking a language that, to this day, I cannot comprehend. I opened my eyes a crack and peeked out the door window, slightly anxious someone would walk in right at that very moment and, well, I don’t know what, but the thought made me even more uncomfortable than the tongue clicking and the Coptic words circling the single wooden desk and wafting up to the ceiling. I was relieved when they ended with a resounding amen. I went home that afternoon filled with nothing less than wonder at what had happened in my classroom that day, but the story doesn’t end there.

It was 8:10AM the next morning, and the bell was just about to ring. I had greeted all of my first period students at the door, and was just about to pull it closed for the final bell when Paul walked past me. I felt no physical symptoms as he came through the entry way. Maybe he had emptied the trash before returning to class.

     “Good morning, Paul.” I said, surprised they had let him come back to class the very next day without some sort of discipline action. He just nodded his head and crossed the room heading straight toward his assigned seat. He sat down in his desk chair and immediately jumped up and moved to an empty  desk by the wall on the opposite side of the class room.

     “What’s up, Paul? Why aren’t you in your seat?”

     “I don’t want to sit there anymore.”

For some reason, I didn’t feel I should press the issue that day. I was quietly astounded. There really was "victory in Jesus," and I was a first hand witness.

I had one more “Paul experience” that was unsettling besides the fact he soon ended his school career in a crisis center under suicide watch, and I never saw him again.  Just a few days after the miracle of the defeat of the desk devils, he turned in a written report with these words across the top, “The beast said with a grin, you will be mine.” That sick feeling rolled over me again as I read his paper. He was an excellent writer, so I gave him the grade he deserved and wrote these words at the bottom of the page, “Greater is He that is in me than he that is in the world.”

Somewhere in this story a miracle is hidden.

I just hope somehow, somewhere Paul discovered the miracle of grace and rest for his soul.

 

The Healer

     The bare terrazzo floor was cold beneath my feet. I sat back in a chair I can't picture now, and put my right foot into the plastic pan on the floor. Mama opened a box of Epsom Salts and poured in a generous dose. She went to the kitchen and brought back a pan of water, hot off the stove and poured it over  the salts and my swollen, purple foot. It scalded me, and I jerked my foot out of the water. "It's too hot!" Tears ran down my cheeks, and Mama gently placed my foot back into the water.

     "You have to leave it there as long as possible," she said with sympathy and a voice full of tears lodged in the throat instead of flowing.

     Mama kept me home from school that day and poured water and salts over my foot for hours. I didn't hear her prayers, but they filled the room and penetrated the ugly red stripes running up my leg and the puss filled blisters on my heel and they transformed my poisoned foot into an eight year old foot again, just like God intended. It wasn't until years later that I realized how serious my infection was.

     Mama isn't materially present any more, but the spirit of love and healing she gave to me that day and countless days after never cease, and neither did Mama. Love is eternal.

     

If you abide in my, and my words abide in you, ask for whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.

John 15:7
Peace. Love, Linda