Uh-oh.

I can feel it coming in the air tonight. Phil Collins style.

School. It starts soon.

Which means the nightmares have already begun. Literally. Every night. I won't bore you with the details (don't you just hate it when people tell you every detail of their boring dreams and they last FOREVER?? Yeah, I've done it before too. Sorry.), but they're scary.

When I first started teaching, TFA showed us a diagram that was supposed to chart our emotions over the course of a school year. It looks like this:



My friend Sara redrew it to represent a more accurate account of what truly takes place:



Funny right? (You can check out her blog here)

I want to start off this year so much better and do a much better job (boy, that was eloquent, was it not?), but DARE I DREAM?? I've had expectations before and where did that get me? Oh yeah, waving scissors in children's faces.

BUT. I learned so much last year...about myself, about the profession, about the kids, about the Lord...And I'm still here, which means I still have a job to do. So I remain cautiously hopeful, timidly excited. As terrified as I am to begin year two, I'm eager to see what the Lord has in store. As many people have expressed to me over the summer--you are too! I hope that for a lot of you, this has become more than a collection of entertaining stories. I hope it's become a very real portrait of a group of kids who fly under the radar so often and who need love and stability more than you can imagine and more than I can give.

Will you pray for the new group of kids coming August 25? Will you pray that God will equip me with everything I need to serve them? It makes me excited to know that so many of you will.

I was talking to my dear friend SK today. She taught with me at RMS last year (meaning she laughed with me, cried with me and prayed with me on a day-to-day basis. In that order). We were imagining what it would be like to teach in a wealthy private school. You know, where kids cared about their grades and did what you told them to do (!?). As many tears as it would save us, we decided that it would be...well, dull. Along with the tears, it would also save us a lot of laughter and excitement. Even though most days we forgot our kids were kids and thought of them as "The Enemy," God answered our prayers that we would walk away with love for them; in an inexplicable way we are still drawn to them.

This was supposed to be a really short post.

Oh guess what? I'm teaching mixed gender classes this year! Which means girls! And bigger class sizes! And who knows what else! I'm off to go plan...