Humility in Teaching

She, quite simply, was not pretty. Her hair was often matted, her skin was crawling with scabies and the dirt on her face looked like a road map. Her bangs were often trimmed by her kinder-scissors and her outfits were usually miss-matched boy's clothes. I wish I could claim that her personality made up for her haggard appearance, unfortunately it did not. She could disrupt hundreds of people with her shrill yelling, and with some sort of a super-human ability could climb the church walls.

She was a Kindergartner bussed in on Wednesday night to church. I was a teenage volunteer. I can't claim I was any prettier, inside or out. I was at the lovely middle school age. I had curly hair that I had no idea how to control so it was stacked in mounds of frizz at the top of my head, my face was the lovely shade of pizza and my teeth were adorned with the classic metal decorations of so many teens. My personality, well, that's a story in and of itself. I lived to please. I was a sit in your chair, both legs on the floor, look straight ahead never make a peep kind of kid. I volunteered and attended church every time they found a reason to open the doors and was quite the model child.

And I knew it.

My righteous attitude was probably not very becoming, but I hardly thought about it. My goal was to be perfect, not graceful. Others' opinion of me was the driving force of all my behavior.

I worked as a helper in the Kindergarten class. Unfortunately for me, that meant I spent all of my Wednesday nights peeling this preschooler off of the walls, dragging her to our next destination, keeping her from impaling others with her scissors and pleading with her to comply with the teacher's expectations.

I was also blessed with bathroom duty.

That night was much like any other and she was in her usual mode of destructiveness. I was standing guard outside her stall to make sure she didn't harass the other girls by crawling into their stalls and to assure that the filthy hands she brought to church that night were washed.

She came out of her stall with the widest grin I think I had ever seen on her face and announced, "Teacher, I peed on my feet!"