Dear Younger Self,

Buy stock in a little company called Microsoft.

Lots of it.

Now.

Love,

Me

Reading good literature with my students is a great joy, yet often my hardest work. In our latest literary venture, I am reading aloud a historical fiction book called Chains by Laurie Halse Anderson. Set during the American Revolution, the main character is a young slave girl living with her masters in New York City as the fight for independence begins. Through this story we are exploring the great paradox of a country founded on the concept of freedom, while cruelly enslaving people of color. In it we read the soaring words of our founding fathers about holding all men created equal, while looking at the ways some people were considered and treated as less than human.

Honestly, at first, I was highly skeptical my students would grasp the big concepts of this story. As usual, they have proven me wrong and are rising to the occasion. Not only are they following the story, they became outraged at the history and they are asking me hard questions. To many of these questions I just have to answer, "I don't know." Sometimes I will try to throw in a "We can do better" tidbit.

Another purpose with this book is to model to my students that good readers follow the main character so closely, that they feel they are in the story with the character, feeling what they are feeling. We define this as empathy. There is a point in the story after the slave girl Isabel tries to run away, she is put in stocks and branded on her face with an I for insolence. With my students gathered around me, I read to that scene but could not continue because my tears were falling, my heart was hurting, and my voice was shaking. The class sat silently during that holy moment as one boy slowly, quietly brought me a tissue. As I tried to compose myself I heard another student whisper, "That is empathy."

"Yes, that is empathy." I said. And we read on.

PS. "A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest." ~C.S. Lewis

It's a great book and I highly recommend it to all.

Every morning, I am born having both the image of God and the fallen nature of the world within me. I hold an enormous capacity for love, and also a dogged bent for destruction of myself and others. I am simultaneously sinner and saint.

Yet God's mercies are new every morning.

The more I know the less I understand.

We are more than just the sum of our mistakes and our good deeds.

There is grace.

Every good scientist and every good theologian comes to the point of saying, "I don't know."

It is not our theology that saves

us.

There is more than we see.

There is enough.

And this just in...

"Maybe, just maybe, there is no plan, there is only love."

-David Lose

"Mrs. Adams, in the Civil War, which side were you on?"

It is Friday afternoon, time to go home and I am tired, so I just answer, "The North."

He nods wisely and says "Yeah, that's who I would've gone for too."

Behind him Angelina rolls her eyes and giggles.

I will straighten this out on Monday.