Tonight I left a comment on a fb post by a friend. Her son didn’t make the basketball team and he is devastated. I wrote something along the lines of, in addition to knowing that God has more for him and not being able to see the long game from here, that I prayed they would soon see (as we did this year) that sometimes God blesses us by taking things away.
I’m not so good at deciding on “no”. I’m not good at quitting things or refusing things or saying no thank you to things. Ironically, I’m also not good at losing. I’m not good at not making things or not getting what I want. In high school, I never ran for SGA because I was afraid I wouldn’t get it. If I ever had a doubt about making something, I just didn’t try for it.
Last spring, I applied for a teacher grant to take a trip to Europe with a Holocaust curriculum organization. This is going to sound super arrogant, and I’m aware of that, but here’s the truth: I KNEW when I applied that I would get it. In fact, I said these exact words to Kraig, “I need us to both be in agreement before I apply, because there is no doubt I’ll get it.” And it’s not even terribly arrogant (though it sounds it), it’s just logic. I have been teaching about the Holocaust for 19 years, I have been a Teacher Fellow with the TN Holocaust Commission for 15 of those, I teach a course for which I wrote the curriculum, I have won awards in the field, and I use this curriculum regularly. It’s a no-brainer. I just needed to make sure that I was okay with it because it would mean getting back home from Cambodia on a Monday and leaving for Europe less than a week later, then missing the first half of in-service week and returning to school literally the day after I got back. I can be a machine when I need to, and I was desperate to do this trip, so I knew I could make it.
We would be notified in April as to whether or not we got it, so imagine my shock to receive an email from the organization in March while on Spring Break. My first thought when I saw it in my email was that it was a quick and easy decision so they sent them out early. And I was ready! I had priced airfare and asked permission to miss the days of in-service.
Except that it wasn’t an acceptance email. It was a rejection email. I actually read it three times, I was so sure that I had misunderstood. I was breathless. How in the world??? How had I not gotten it??? Well, the email stated that they had such a response that they did the first two cuts by eliminating anyone who had already been to Yad Vashem or Auschwitz. With that, I was out of the running.
I don’t think they have ever used that criteria before, and nothing in the paperwork made mention of it mattering how widely you had traveled before. First time for everything, I guess!
What I realized in July of this year, upon my return to the US from Cambodia and at the beginning of some weird foot swelling thing that started the end of July (while I would have been in Europe, walking nonstop), is that I couldn’t have done it. I never would have been able to pull off getting home from one trip across the world and then left immediately for another across the pond, then gotten back and started school with students. It would have set a tone of complete exhaustion and challenge on a year that would bring more than its fair share of both.
I didn’t know any of that. I don’t say “no”. I don’t try for things that aren’t for sure. But He knew all of it and He blessed me by taking away the opportunity. It was the same thing He did for Emma this year in regard to volleyball. He knew how much of her joy was lost to that white ball and the image it gave her of herself. He knew how frustrating and difficult so many parts of being on that team were for all of us, things I didn’t even realize until it was over. It didn’t feel like a blessing at the time, but it was. Some days since, it hasn’t felt like a blessing, like the game I forced myself to go to this year to support my students and the loss of being part of it was almost too much to bear... like the day they left for state and we cheered them on in the hallways and I unexpectedly started to cry because I was always certain that would be us one day, that volleyball would always be part of our life. I missed some of the girls. I missed some of the parents. I missed the thought of a senior night, of putting a picture of Emma at her first volleyball camp as a tiny girl next to her senior photo. I just missed it. I call volleyball the sport that broke my heart, and I wasn’t even the player. But the truth is, volleyball MAY HAVE broken my heart, but we are so much better off without it. Its absence is a blessing.
He does give and take away, and often He takes what He does because we aren’t smart enough to know to say “no” to it. It’s just the blessing of addition through subtraction.
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