How I Do What I Do

Learning from a New Teacher - Sept 2013

A couple weeks ago I dropped one of the volunteers I work with for her first day of Kindergarten - as a teacher's assistant not a student lah. Later that same day I took her to the second site that she'll be helping at for the year, a home for people with physical and developmental disabilities, she learned that it also had a bakery and was opening up an early intervention center for your children with special needs. Lots of children! And baking! These are a few of her favorite things!

She turned to me and said, "Peter, I don't know how you did this . . ."

I replied and said, frankly, "I really don't know. Mostly I fly on a wing and a prayer. . . I think(?)."

There's a lot of trust involved in the work that I do. In the springtime I receive twenty applications to read for up to ten spaces in the program. I spend an hour in an interview with most of them during one intense weekend in April. At the close of the weekend there is thirty-minutes to gather as a country group before they depart and I see them again in August. That really isn't a lot of information to base a decision off of and yet, somehow, it works.

Pairing what I've learned about the incoming volunteers with what I know of their communities of service in Southeast Asia, I mentally try and piece the puzzle together. Mostly, though, I try to quiet my senses in order to discern and to trust what I've come to describe as the stirrings of the Spirit. Taking a risk and believing that a guy from the Dakotas with no previous experience whatsoever would flourish as a teacher in a mountain town in the interior of Borneo, trusting my gut that a young youth leader from Minnesota was wired to work with people with special needs, or that a girl from South Carolina would say, "Good job, Holy Spirit, " as she found her favorite things paired, as they have been, on the far side of the planet.

Seeing what happens when those pairings work out, when those imagined possibilities take on a life of their own, that gives me great and makes me feel great pride - even though, admittedly, the work is not my own.

Swinging around to a more introspective perspective, I am realizing (again) that I tend to live my own life in a similar manner. As a problem solver and an artist, my eyes are constantly scanning for the ways in which different pieces of the world around me might fit together, looking for patterns, and seeing connections. Like a figure from Alice's Wonderland, I imagine (im)possibilities - believing as many as six (im)possible things before breakfast on any given day. When it comes time to act, time to decide, I draw on what I've observed, am inspired by what I've imagined, and lean hard on the goodness and graciousness of that same Spirit.

And then I leap.