“Show me how to love, like You have loved me.”
This was part of a song that was sung a lot back in high
school, and one of the lines that felt very heavy. And like my best friend
always says, “Be careful what you challenge God with, after sure kena wan”.
So I never expected to be a teacher, and lagi lah didn’t expect
to learn the magnitude of God’s love and how we are expected to love others the
way He loves us by being a teacher. But this thought came while I was walking
to class one day. Along the corridors of the school, the students have put up a bunch of
supposedly motivational quotes (I say supposedly because there was a quote from
1984, the one that goes “Freedom is slavery, strength is ignorance…”). But this
one really hit home hard:
Love does not need to be fair or equal. It just needs to be
real.
I often think of love as something that should be fair. I
love those who love me. I’m friends with those who seem to want to be my
friend. I stopped caring as much about the people that seemed distant or couldn’t
care less. But Jesus did say, “If you only love those who love you, what better
are you than the pagans?” And one major lesson about love that I’ve come to
learn over the two years of being a teacher is the part about undeserving love.
I have no attachments to my students. I am neither their
father nor their mother. I am not blood related, don’t share their culture, and
do not speak their language. In fact, they constantly speak their foreign
tongues in front of me so I do not understand them. I am not a permanent
teacher, nor am I part of the community. There is no reason that any of these
students should deserve my love. Yet I do, for the trivial reason that I am
their teacher.
They screw up daily; there’s those that are rude, those that
are lazy, those that challenge me and disobey me, the ones that break the rules
and the ones that hate me. Yes, I had a student who called me “female private
parts” and asked if I wanted to be slapped, and another class that tried to intimidate
me with their parents. But yet if any of these kids come to me with their
troubles, there is a part of my brain that will go “Sure, what’s up? How can I
help you?”. Yes, even the kid who wanted to slap me. Every time I see them in class,
they intentionally try to get under my skin, and yet if they were to twist
their ankle, I’d be the first teacher there to patch them up.
There is no reason why God should love us. We’ve messed up
so bad in life. Yet He does. Love does not need to be fair or equal. It just
needs to be real.
---
Grace, what have You done?
Murdered for me on that cross
Accused in absence of wrong
My sin washed away in Your blood
Too much to make sense of it all
I know that Your love breaks my fall
The scandal of grace, You died in my place
So my soul will live
---
Grace, what have You done?
Murdered for me on that cross
Accused in absence of wrong
My sin washed away in Your blood
Too much to make sense of it all
I know that Your love breaks my fall
The scandal of grace, You died in my place
So my soul will live
