Breaking open

I broke down last night. It had been building for awhile, and last night when I was driving home I couldn't hold it in any longer. Everytime I sit down to read for my Urban Education class, I am equally inspired and overwhelmed by the journey I have committed to by starting this graduate program. It's a journey that I thought I knew, but now looks nothing like what I thought it would. It's messier, more complex, more heartbreaking than I imagine and driven me to question if I even have any business teaching urban youth.

And it's forced me to dig deep into my past and realize just how much my privileged upbringing and education at the same time "protected" me and mislead me to the point where I am wondering if I have enough critical consciousness to help urban youth become critically conscious about the highly racialized world we live in.

I went to the Teachers for Social Justice conference on Saturday and the keynote speaker, Derrick Smith, had incredibly powerful things to say. But while the crowd was cheering and hollering like it was a church rival meeting without the amens, I was becoming more and more somber, wondering if I really had it in me to develop the enormous amount of courage I knew it was going to take to continue down this path to teach urban youth.

The speaker said "Our students are victims and they need healing" not just some cool cat from Stanford coming in trying to teach them something with his fancy theories and claiming he knows how to get them out of their situation. "You can't save your students," Smith said. "You can join them in the process in which they save themselves."

At the same time as these thoughts are wrestling within me, the community that has become my family in the city is wrestling with change. Change that is hard. Change that has been so slow and painful that last week I wanted to say "Screw it! I'm done with you!"

But this is the community that showed me unconditional love was possible, and that I didn't have to prove anything to earn their love. They didn't know a thing about me and let me come on their retreat and cry and tell my story. They sat in my pain with me. They asked hard questions instead of giving easy answers. Over the past two years they've taught me it's okay not to be okay. They are a good part of why I love this city so much and why, three months ago I could endure a painful ending to a job with grace and celebration. And I was ready to walk away, even more so after our meeting last night.

But then I thought of one phrase that a different speaker said on Sunday night. She was talking about relationships and brought up the vow "for richer or for poorer." "We don't really know how to be there in the 'for poorer' part of relationships," she said.

She's right. We don't. This isn't a marriage, but I think the same principals apply to marriage as to other committed relationships we're in. I don't know how to keep being a part of this family when it isn't filling a need that I have right now. But I'll stay. Not because I necessarily want to. But because I've made a commitment. And they are my family and we're grounded in something higher than ourselves. My story is not the only story, and maybe the family needs to look different for a bit for them. God has woven our stories together and I need to trust we'll move out of the "for poorer" and again into the "for richer."