by Jason Byassee, May 13, 2014
Jason Byassee
May is Teacher Appreciation month. It is a good time to reach back out to teachers who influenced and blessed and loved us well. It is also a good time for our church to think about the God-given goodness of the vocation of teaching. Each week in May we’ll interview one of our teachers about their work and the ways they find God in it. I hope we’ll all learn more about the richness of the body of Christ of which we are all a part.
Tracy Smith (Part 2)
How does your faith weigh into your work as a teacher, since obviously it shouldn’t explicitly do so in a public school setting?
Teaching has been my ministry. Sometimes, I have felt guilty that my ministry is not more “religious.” However, for me, teaching is sacred. I have taught middle school, high school, undergraduate and graduate students, and faculty peers. As a middle school teacher, I read aloud often to my students, so that I could convey voices of characters to students and bring those characters to life. I knew eighth grade might be the last chance to bestow on them a love of reading. I wanted them to long to read, to experience literature and stories, as I had. I wanted them to feel the tension in the courtroom as Atticus Finch taught his children, his neighbors, and generations of Harper Lee’s readers what real courage is. Teaching is investing in the lives of others. But I am the one who has received the most. Over and over, my students show me their generosity, compassion, intellect, curiosity – evidence that they are made in the image of God.
Tell me about a time when God surprised you with the goodness of your vocation?
In 1996, I was teaching eighth grade. My students and I wrote in journals and we took some time to share our writings with each other. Students often wanted me to read my entries. I wrote about what a wonderful group they were. I wrote about specific students and their acts of kindness, moments of exciting learning in our classroom, and other moral lessons.
That year, my grandmother became chronically ill. I stayed with her in the hospital for thirteen weeks. Sometimes, I was called away to go to her house and reinsert her feeding tube. During that time, instead of writing about my students, I wrote about my grandmother. Each Monday, my students wanted to hear about how she had done over the weekend. They extended care to me. My grandmother died in March, just before my students and I were to leave for a spring break trip to Washington, DC. We had worked so hard together raising the funds for this trip. The funeral was scheduled for the day of our departure. The bus with my students and the volunteer chaperones would have to leave without me. It was spring break so I couldn’t get a flight. Through a blessed series of events, the father of one of my students arranged my flight with a friend of his on a private plane – for only the cost of the fuel. At my grandmother’s service, I had four blue hydrangeas waiting for me – all from my students, who knew hydrangeas were my favorite. [I have moved those hydrangeas to three different houses]. I left after the funeral for my flight to DC. When I arrived in DC, I turned to pay the pilot. He said, “No, don’t worry. Someone already paid me.” I met my students at the Lincoln Memorial. They showered me with questions and condolences. What a wonderful group of human beings. I will never forget the compassion and care they extended to me. I witnessed the power of human kindness budding and blooming. It’s almost funny to me that I was trying to use my journal writing to teach them moral lessons. Today, nearly two decades later, I am Facebook friends with most of those students.
We are connected forever–because I was their teacher.
Tracy Smith is a professor in the College of Education and faculty development consultant at Appalachian State University. She and her family attend the 8:45 am Sunday services at BUMC.
by Jason Byassee, May 7, 2014
Jason Byassee
May is Teacher Appreciation month. It is a good time to reach back out to teachers who influenced and blessed and loved us well. It is also a good time for our church to think about the God-given goodness of the vocation of teaching. Each week in May we’ll interview one of our teachers about their work and the ways they find God in it. I hope we’ll all learn more about the richness of the body of Christ of which we are all a part.
Tracy Smith
New York Times best-selling author Pat Conroy writes
I wanted my teachers to make me smart. A great teacher is my adversary, my conqueror, commissioned to chastise me. He leaves me tame and grateful for the new language he has purloined from other kings whose granaries are filled and whose libraries are famous. He tells me that teaching is the art of theft: of knowing what to steal and from whom. Bad teachers do not touch me; the great ones never leave me. They ride with me during all my days, and I pass on to others what they have imparted to me. I exchange their handy gifts with strangers on trains, and I pretend the gifts are mine. I steal from the great teachers. And the truly wonderful thing about them is they would applaud my theft, laugh at the thought of it, realizing they had taught me their larcenous skills well.
What got you into teaching?
I always loved school. It was a safe place for me. I had excellent teachers who challenged me, loved me, nurtured me, read to me, and prepared me to think about a future that included college.
I found a sanctuary when I started school. I had access to colorful books, a clean classroom with shiny, waxed linoleum floors, and a warm meal at lunchtime. I was poor, but public education was free, and at a very early age, I somehow decided not to waste a priceless opportunity.
Rather than looking at my unfashionable clothes and hairstyle and imposing on me labels like “unfortunate” or “under-resourced,” most of my teachers saw the potential hidden inside me. My teachers challenged me to learn all that I could. Because of their encouragement and support, I received scholarships to fund my bachelor’s degree. I graduated with a B.A. degree in Secondary English Education from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. And I became a teacher, too.
Tell me about a teacher you admired.
Sorry, I have two…
In third grade, every day before lunch, Mr. Ferguson would ask us to sit in a circle around his rocking chair, and he would read aloud to us. I have such vivid and fond memories of
Mr. Ferguson reading aloud to the class and bringing to life E.B. White’s barnyard tale of an unlikely friendship between a pig and a spider. Mr. Ferguson gave me a wonderful gift that year: love of reading. Antoine de Saint Exupery, author of The Little Prince once wrote, “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” I longed for those 30 minutes, sitting at the feet of my teacher while he made stories come to life.
I was fortunate enough to have a high school English teacher who was an academic–she held a Ph.D. in English from Duke. She was a scholar who focused her work on her students’ learning. She studied our needs in order to challenge us. She was well-read and intelligent. She was the smartest person I had ever met. But somehow she made me believe I was smart, too.
I remember sitting in Dr. Eggers’s English class during my senior year of high school. I was a bit uneasy because she expected so much from me and from all my peers. She challenged us in a way that no other teacher had. I was not sure I could deliver. But she was. At that time, I didn’t even know what a Ph.D. was. No one in my family had ever even attended a university. Still, I remember thinking, “I don’t know what a Ph.D. is, but I’m going to get one someday.” In 1999, I was awarded a Ph.D. (with distinction) in Curriculum and Teaching. I returned to my high school and taught high school English with Dr. Eggers. She was my department chair, and still an inspiration, still my teacher.
In one class period per day, in one school year, her influence changed my life forever.
To be continued….
by Jason Byassee, May 2, 2014
Jason Byassee
May is Teacher Appreciation month. It is a good time to reach back out to teachers who influenced and blessed and loved us well. It is also a good time for our church to think about the God-given goodness of the vocation of teaching. Each week in May we’ll interview one of our teachers about their work and the ways they find God in it. I hope we’ll all learn more about the richness of the body of Christ of which we are all a part.
Katie Mauldin Matthews
What got you into teaching?
My parents were in education for over 40 years. My earliest memory is sitting at the dinner table listening to my parents share stories about their classrooms. I knew that I would be sharing those same stories with my own family one day. My parents never led me to believe that it was an easy career. It would not be rewarded with money, but in my students’ successes.
As a student, I was surrounded by good teachers. Mrs. Kluttz, my sixth grade teacher, changed my outlook on what makes a teacher outstanding. I was suddenly held accountable for my own learning and was, for the first time, truly excited about school. She cared about our thinking process, answered questions with questions, and knew her students as individuals and formed meaningful relationships with them. In a very short time, teachers can have a lifelong effect.
Creating relationships with my students and their families has become the foundation of each school year. I know them and they know me. We are accountable to each other. I encourage my students to challenge each other to be better people. I see such growth throughout the year as my students become wise decision makers and understand the effect their actions have on others. It is not an easy task to teach students to question, respect others’ thoughts, construct creative solutions, and realize that what they learn is their responsibility. Creating a classroom that focuses daily on citizenship and academics benefits each student and our society.
Tell me about a teacher you admired.
I admired the teachers who made me work hard. It helped me develop my self-confidence doing something I doubted I could do, but with the encouragement of a teacher, I did my best and worked hard–even if I failed the first time.
I am amazed every day by my colleagues. They are selfless. Teaching is a tireless job and at times, thankless. My fellow teachers give of themselves daily. They offer endless
support to other teachers and creative ideas to enhance instruction.
How does your faith weigh into your work as a teacher, since obviously it shouldn’t explicitly do so in a public school setting?
The blessing and the curse of being a teacher is that everything is temporary. The group of students that you wish you could teach forever, you only get for 10 months. Parents who are supportive of you and their own children–10 months. Colleagues and administrators who make going to work fun and rewarding, similarly short-lived. These blessings make the challenges bearable. Policy makers who are on a two-year cycle, students who challenge you at every turn, parents who want you to be their child’s other parent instead of their teacher or who want it all to be easy–I’ve lost sleep over those. But God grants me so many blessings that the challenges that come my way are easier to handle. Trust me, there is a lot of prayer in school. Ask any teacher the week before spring break, the day after Halloween, the night before a new school year, or EOG testing, or parent teacher conferences, or on mornings when you run out of coffee or afternoons when chocolate is scarce. There are also prayers of thanks when a child has donated food to take home, when a local business gives warm coats, when a child finally gets it, when a parent surprises by showing up for a school event, when you get that needed hug from any of your students, when the school year ends and you see how you helped mold and shape students into who they are supposed to be.
Katie Mauldin Matthews teaches at Valle Crucis Elementary School and was Watauga County’s Teacher of the Year in 2012-2013.
by Jason Byassee, April 15, 2014
Jason Byassee
Failure is an odd topic for Easter. But it is not unfamiliar to any of us. Most of us could probably imagine a scenario by which we would fail–in family, at work, in play, with friendships, in life. Many of us are motivated partly by fear of failure. I know I am.
Yet there is something freeing about failure. Think of the sports team that knows it is out of the playoffs that suddenly plays loose, together, like they have nothing to lose. Is it any surprise they’re suddenly good? Something happens when we loosen our white-knuckle grip on the thing we care about too much, with which we’re trying to prove ourselves. Lose it, and suddenly you can be yourself, exhale, relax, live. Personally I’ve noticed some of my best moments have come after failure. Then you can be magnanimous in defeat, congratulate the victor, learn from missteps, and step into a broader life.
There are worse things than failure. Much, much worse.
The bible has a lot to say about failure. In holy week we see portraits of two cataclysmic failures. Peter betrays his Lord. This after Jesus had predicted it in remarkable detail. Peter swore it would never happen and then it did, precisely as Jesus had said (with a bit of confusion over whether the cock would crow once or twice, but never mind). Judas, so trusted once the disciples asked him to guard the group’s (paltry) money supply, sought to add to his personal wealth by turning the Lord over to the authorities. Theories abound as to why he did this–was he trying to force Jesus into a confrontation with Rome that would end with Jesus as victorious king? Was he just greedy, an agent of evil? The bible doesn’t say. It just says he committed a monstrous misdeed for which he could not forgive himself. He committed suicide.
Here is what scripture is saying with these two portraits of failure: the difference between Peter and Judas is simply whether they were willing to receive forgiveness. Peter is restored to Jesus’ trust by being asked three times, “Do you love me?” Peter says he does. “Feed my lambs,” Jesus instructs. And Peter does, becoming the most important leader among the Twelve after Jesus’ resurrection. Judas did not linger for any such restoration. His turning in of the Lord was crucial–Jesus going to his death means life for the world. Surely there would have been restoration for him too, as with Peter. But he could not stand his failure, did not seek the chance for restoration. In the 10-part miniseries called The Bible from last year (the Jesus portion of which became the movie Son of God this spring), Judas receives the Last Supper from Jesus’ hand. When he goes out to betray Jesus, he chokes on the wafer. He couldn’t get that broken body of forgiveness into his system.
Peter and Judas are not the only failures in Holy Week. Jesus dies for all our sins. All institutions–religious, civil, military, social–team up and crucify Jesus. We all shout our demand for his death. We roll a stone in front of his tomb so he won’t come back and bother us again.
Then he’s back. Stone rolled away. His body restored, made new, as fresh as Adam in Eden, as fresh as your newborn, as scarred as anyone, but made new. Our failure led to his resurrection. And now he is offering us forgiveness, restoration, the charge to feed his lambs.
The worst failure ever has already happened in our successful execution of Jesus. Now no failure can come close to that one. And that failure meant life for the world.
What fruit can this resurrection, new-making God bear through our failures? Come worship with us all Holy Week and then on Easter morn and let’s find out together.
by Jason Byassee, March 21, 2014
Jason Byassee
I long for the day when the first question I get at church isn’t, “So how are you feeling?” I have been moved to see the church care for me and my family through back surgery and a stomach bug. But in an effort to change the subject, let me tell you what else is going on these days at Boone Methodist.
First: we are going to overhaul our audio/visual system throughout the campus, starting with the family life center, then the sanctuary, then the chapel. This will be expensive (some $200,000), but it is long overdue. You will start to see new equipment in Crossroads within three weeks. I learned (from another doctor visit!) this week that I have above-average hearing. And despite this, I often cannot hear in the sanctuary. If you sit under the balcony in the sanctuary you can hardly hear a thing. The chapel is worse still–outfitted essentially with car stereos that are past their prime. When Sarah Strickland sought to have music played at an event in our family life center recently, nothing happened. When this overhaul is over, any leader who asks for a song or video as part of worship will be able to be confident it will work. I am especially grateful to Buck Roberts of Selah Media here in Boone who will do this overhaul for us, to Alan Herman who led a task force to decide between five bidders, and to our new member and leader Doug Kaufman who will project manage it for us.
Second, this has been a busy season of missions for us. Our Guatemala team has recently returned with wonderful photos and videos you can see on our church’s Facebook page. Luke Edwards and Colette Krontz have planned a family mission trip for us for this summer to Cherokee. In each of these places and on each of these pilgrimages, Jesus works powerfully and lives are changed there and here.
Third, we have some Sunday School additions you should know about. Jonathan Allen, one of our most terrifically talented teachers, has launched a new Sunday School class called Oasis aimed at age 18 to parenthood. We find that the key differentiator isn’t so much calendar years as it is stage of life, and folks pre-kids have more in common than folks with kids. A Lenten study upcoming will be offered by Natasha Schoonover in the conference room starting March 23 on bodies–the body of Christ, and our bodies. And on April 6th and May 4th we’ll have special offerings in the chapel–Brandon Wrencher, our new pastor at Blackburn’s, and Lindsey Long, our outgoing one (sniff!) will brief us on the staggeringly beautiful work they’re doing in Todd on April 6. On May 4 George Thompson, our former pastor, will teach in the Sunday School hour and offer a reception and book signing at 2 pm. We also have a new online Sunday School option for which you can peruse courses here: https://www.churchnext.tv/school/catalog/ and let pastor Jason know which you’d like to try. Lent is a time for new commitments, and joining one of these Sunday School classes would be a great way to be filled with more of Jesus.
Finally, in worship we have begun a new series on Treasure that will run through Easter. Vern Collins in Crossroads and I in the sanctuary will preach through brief texts from the gospels on what we really treasure. Please continue vigilantly with what you’ve given up for Lent–we will collect an offering for missions on Easter. Read the devotionals on the Facebook page and website or in the booklets in the chapel. Please also feel invited to join our Stephen Ministers in a First Friday Fast–they give up a meal on the first Friday of the month, and when they feel hunger they turn it to prayer. What a great season–to redirect all our hearts Godward.
Which is what the church is for in the first place.
by Jason Byassee, February 26, 2014
Jason Byassee
The church exists for worship and mission. One feeds the other and both draw us toward Jesus.
This is a great time of year for both. Our Rwanda team has just returned and our Guatemala team is about to be sent out. We worshiped last Saturday night, February 22, and will worship in a new style on March 1. March 2nd marks the beginning of Lent, 40 days of a lonely road with Jesus on the way to his cross. Worship and mission are the two lungs of the church’s body, and both are full at the moment.
Here is what’s to come: on Saturday night, March 1st, we’ll worship in the chapel at 6:30 with a form of chant called Taize. It is simple, hauntingly beautiful, and unforgettable. Here’s a glimpse of how it sounds. Saturday night is the least utilized portion of our week. Many Christian traditions offer an evening worship service. These experimental gatherings are a way of asking whether Jesus is calling us to worship regularly that evening, perhaps with styles as varied as roots revival, Taize, blue grass, and maybe others (jazz?).
On Ash Wednesday, March 5th, we’ll gather in the Family Life Center for a pancake supper. Strove Tuesday (Mardi Gras in French speaking parts) is a day for feasting before the fast of Lent begins. Sarah Strickland is heading our family life committee now and needs some flapjack flippers–please be in touch with her to volunteer, or view the evite here. We’ll worship in the sanctuary at 7 and receive ashes on our foreheads as a sign of our mortality (“remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return” Gen. 3:19).
Often folks give things up for Lent: chocolate, cussing, being a Carolina fan. But a friend’s church gave me an idea. What if we each gave up something important to us that costs money–coffee, meat, alcohol, meals out, movies. Then we pool that money we would have spent on ourselves and put it toward missions. We have so many things we could contribute to–the Justice family hasn’t yet quite gotten fully funded, our Rwanda and Guatemala teams would love to be more generous in those areas, WeCan and Circles here in the High Country needs further funding.
I propose that we, Boone Methodist, each give up something and then offer what we would have spent in a special offering on Easter Sunday. We’ll have done something small to discipline our desires in (tiny!) imitation of Christ who emptied himself to save us. And we’ll offer enough to make a difference in our generosity as a congregation and in God’s world. We will continue to honor our long tradition of the Thirty Pieces of Silver offering, with this as an extra challenge. What do you think? As ever feel free to offer input: seniorminister@booneumc.org.
Final thing for today: several folks have asked me why church is necessary. Sunday is their sanctuary, they love being with their family uninterrupted (their homes must be more pacific than mine!). This is a beautiful question. It suggests genuine Sabbath rest in those households, and that honors God. Hard questions always do.
Let me tell you a quick story in response. Ellary Smith is Tommy and Tracy’s daughter. She not only sees her parents play music Sundays and practice Wednesdays, she sees them lead with their contagious spirit for Jesus, for our church, and for the marginalized. Ellary has taken to writing praise songs herself. She loves to robe up as an acolyte, to wear the cross, to bear the flame into the world. She loves Sunday School. She loves our church. “She’d live here if we let her,” Tracy joked.
The point of church isn’t to be happier, though it has that effect. It’s not to be a more moral person, though it certainly helps. Church only matters if God is who he says he is in scripture, if we desperately need Jesus to save us, if lingering in God’s presence makes us more human. “The glory of God is a human being fully alive,” St. Irenaeus said way back in the 2nd century. And at Boone Methodist one little girl is more alive as she lingers in God’s presence.
And that’s about the best reason I can give why you, your family, your neighbors, your enemies, everyone you and I know, should join us Sundays, Saturdays, Wednesdays, always.
