I'm a little amazed that the midquarter of my last quarter of my first year teaching is almost here. Wow. It's been a rocky year. But I can confidently say that it's been fantastic. It hasn't all been "I love this!" moments... in fact I'm definitely on the upward turn of a "I hate this!" period.

We had our school banquet last night - being a small private school has lots to offer but we always seem to be behind in the financial respects. So there was a silent auction, a live auction, dinner, laughter, and cream sodas. It was a nice evening.

One of our current teachers, who has been at Heritage for more years that my brain wants to compute right now, was one of the three speakers last night. She told a story about how often times as a teacher or an administrator we feel like we become "invisible." We say things in our classroom and none of the students respond. We have countdowns for when students need to bring in supplies and they still forget. And we spend hours and hours on lesson plans, creating amazing experiences, and they still flop and kids walk away unchanged.

After setting the stage Mrs. Amos told us about a video that her sister had emailed her, forgive me but I cannot remember who did the speaking on the video. The lady talked about a period in her life where she felt she had become "invisible" and subsequently a friend of hers who knew of the plight, brought back a book on Cathedrals from the European area for her after a vacation. The lady didn't understand the inscription that the friend had written in the book so she went and did a little research on the Cathedrals and discovered that most of them had been constructed over a 300 year span with no blueprints. In addition to that, some of the most important and time-staking details were either covered up with later construction, or closed off so that only God's eyes would see them.

This is what education sometimes feels like. We have to be reminded that we're not necessarily working for the children, but we're working for God and His plan is greater than anything we can imagine.

When our good intentions don't work out as planned, God sees.

When we stay hours after school to grade papers, God sees.

When our hard work crumbles to pieces, God sees.

When things work out better than we expected, and no one else notices, God sees.