Embracing it all

This semester I'm student teaching at a school that is a bit of a commute away each day. While on my drive, I recently listened to Coldplay's album "A Head Full of Dreams" in full for the first time. I've hardly stopped listening to it since and am amazed by it, grateful for it and glad it is new to me in my life right now, if not new to the world (it was released in 2015).

The album as a whole reminds me of the hope there is in healing, that healing and life are processes and that God brings good out of everything; if we're disappointed, it must not be over yet and God must not be finished because "hope does not disappoint" (Romans 5:5). The album takes me deeper into the mystery of God.

On "Kaleidoscope," the band puts music to excerpts of narration from the poem "The Guest House" by Rumi. The excerpted portions go like this: "This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival -- a joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor. Welcome and entertain them all. Be grateful for whoever comes, because each has been sent as a guide."

I love praying that, love thinking about it in relation to the people who are "arrivals" into my life each day. Each student who comes into my classroom, each co-worker I interact with, each person in every car I pass on the drive is someone I get to accept as they are at that minute in time and welcome them, provide a momentary home or place of belonging for them, as if they are God coming and asking to be born in my stable.

Even -- perhaps especially -- the people who are hardest to love. For me, even my students who other teachers deem as "troublemakers" and who, in my own moments of challenge, seem like wild animals from a planet that I have no experience with, are images of God sent to me to teach me something about my Creator, to lead me more deeply into God's love and amazement and understanding. Maybe these "troublemakers'" jokes that interrupt my lesson and send the other students into wild bouts of laughter are really the desire to be received by their peers, reflecting God's desire to be received and accepted by each of us. After all, that's a need and desire I understand.

It makes each day a real adventure when we're ready and waiting to receive God in each person who comes to us.

I think, really, it's all about letting this attitude of God's love transform us. A lyric in "Up&Up" states, "You can say 'it's mine' and clench your fist, or see each sunrise as a gift."

Each day, each person, is a gift that doesn't have to be given to me, but yet somehow, by God's love and grace, is. That's how I want to choose to see it.