"The Choice is Yours!"

Ugh, I think it needs to be played to the Price is Right music every morning that I hear it!  I teach first grade as you all know and every morning after some good inspirational, often ethnic, music and the national anthem have played our principal comes over the loud speaker, leads us in the pledge of allegiance, the school pledge and then drops a little piece of something into our worlds that is supposed to help us start our day off enthused, inspired, and challenged - no lie most mornings my outlook is O crap, I am completely winging this and in our moment of silence I am sending the big guy upstairs the loudest silent SOS a first year, frazzled teacher girllady can signal!  After his Rev Run speech he always ends with, "Have a good day or bad, the choice is yours."

Last year, I finished grad school and began the job hunt.  I was a nervous mess on an emotional roller coaster filled with high points of hope and dips of rejection.  Literally at the last minute I got offered a job that I didn't think I wanted but was what I accepted as the perfect fit for me at the time.  I woke up ready to go to work, face the day, and love these babies - as the year has progressed, I realize that this is not the idealistic grown up world that I so eagerly sought and that my job is yes meaningful to many but also demoralizing, disheartening, and in some moments degrading.  After going through the job search last year and my future being in the hands of others, I came to a place of the Lord will provide - it was never a question of faith for me but it was not a peaceful faith - and I will have to figure out how to rest peacefully in His care.  That was what was so unnerving about the job finding process, my whole life - where I lived, what I did each day, what I wore, who was in my life was left to the choice of others!  As a believer we know that God has a plan and everything happens for a reason and every other cliche bible beating bandwagon believer quote that everyone uses when they are really looking at you and saying, "Damn, I'm glad that's you and not me!"  But hold the line, when it really comes down to it and there really is nothing under my control - believing it and living it couldn't be more difficult.

So I say to you Mr. Principal, unfortunately, there are many choices that are not ours - including whether or not I am a teacher next year - but the choice that is ours is whether or not we walk by a faith that produces the fruits of the spirit throughout our journey of life and the seasons that we pass through.

I am yet again as a professional with what they say are exceptional performance records, a Bachelors degree, a Masters degree and certificate who isn't actually going to get to decide my professional placement in the coming year.  It is going to be left up to men and women who don't know my name, have never seen my face, and who have wildly misconstrued ideas of my professional responsibilities as one of their employees to determine my professional place in life but this go round I am going to do my best to relish in the fact that I don't have to choose, that I have the opportunity to be released from a professional situation that has emotionally, physically, mentally, financially, and personally threatened to compromise the beauty that was blooming in my life without guilt, without regret, and without strife. 

So I say to you Mr. and Mrs. Schoolboard Member: "The Choice is Yours!" and to you Lord, "May you be ever present in the coming days to bring peace, to bring joy, and to bring wisdom to a situation that is tumultuous, heartbreaking, and befuddling."