I love the scent of Gain laundry detergent. Give me a sock fresh out of the dryer, and I’ll practically clothes-pin it to my nose. I can’t identify it, but whatever it is I can’t get enough. I’d surgically implant it into my nasal passages if I could, but, there are some people who actually prefer other detergents. What is wrong with these misguided folks? Do they not have senses (or sense)? I cringe for these nasally challenged individuals. But really, it’s a matter of perspective; sometimes what floats my boat scuttles yours.
Perspective: it determines how we brush our teeth, comb our hair, pay our bills. Our perspective is a product of our culture, and what we view as the norm changes as our experiences changes.
When I first moved back to Arizona as an adult, I took a job as an inner-city high school nurse. Now, I, too, went to a large Arizona high school, but it was in a much different neighborhood in Tempe. It was 35 minutes and a world away from the job I had signed on for. I was tough, though; I had been an Air Force nurse; nothing was going to come at me that I couldn’t handle. Uh, yep, sure. Keep thinking that.
My first day, prior to the first bell ringing, the door to my office flew open, and a young man with long scruffy hair stepped across the threshold. He had on a long black coat though it was 90 degrees already at 8:00 am. He fixed his icy blue eyes on me sitting behind my glass partition. He spoke in a raspy whisper, “Is that glass bullet proof?”
Now, truthfully, I had no earthly idea, but I can guess that the district did not spend any of its tax payers’ hard earned money on a wall of bullet-proof glass in the high school nurses office – call me crazy. But all I could think at the time was, Uhm, why?, then, Oh, OOOHHHH, I so, so wish it were. So, my longings got the better of me, and I said in a strong voice that sounded nothing like me, “Yes, it is,” and I smiled. I actually smiled at the scary kid in the long, sure-to-be-hiding-a- weapon black coat. He studied my for a minute more, as I sat not blinking – oh, I can soooo do the stare down – then he spun around and was gone.
The door slammed shut after him, and I shrugged it off and went about my business – but not really. Nope, not even a little bit. I jumped up, locked that freaking door, and cried – not very long, and I’m not very proud of it. But there you have it; I cried.
Now, I could’ve chosen to let that one interaction before school ever began eliminate my desire to stay or I could choose to see it as a gift from God pulling me into a deeper relationship with him to love even those kids who terrified me. Guess which I chose to do? Please give me the benefit of the doubt. (BTW, that kid would end up being a “frequent flyer” who came to visit when life just got too stressful, and that coat never hid any weapons – of which I was aware.)
I learned things about myself whilst in that job that were so far from pretty they still make me cringe – like how I take my family for granted. Also on my first day, a freshman boy came to see me – now are you sitting down? This boy was honestly and truly ill. Nope, not afraid of high school, didn’t hate math, didn’t need lunch money. This child actually needed to go home. How awful is that on the first day of school? As I pulled his parent contact card from my file I casually asked this poor, sick kid who I should call, his mother or his father. With an incredible degree of animosity he spat back, “I don’t have a mom.”
I was stunned, not at his anger, but at my thoughtlessness. Of course there would be children who didn’t come from my same 2-parent background, but I hadn’t bothered to stop and consider that some of my patients – some of my kids – would not even know their parents. And I was heartbroken for my sick little 14 year-old, for his mom whoever and wherever she was, and for me at my failed perspective. And that’s when I understood why I was there.
Oh, I know I was there to do my job – to be the school nurse, which I had a lot of fun doing. I also got to be the cheer coach for a while which was somewhere between fantastic fun and unadulterated torture on the scale of the Spanish Inquisition. (After the first few weeks, even the scary looking kids lost the ability to terrify me, much to their chagrin. ) What I mean is why God put me there. I think that my life had been one of privilege, not overwhelmingly so – my maiden name was not Morgan, Rockefeller, or (heaven forbid) even Hilton – though I have thought that if I change my last name again I’m going with “Windsor-Vanderbilt”, what do you think? – but all the same, I never wanted for anything. My parents always found a way to make sure we had what we needed and a lot of what we wanted.
Now, “need” is a terribly relative word, and I’m not quite sure that many people in the USA understand its true meaning. However, some of those kids on that inner- city Phoenix campus lived “need” every day of their young lives. Working there I saw it for the absolute first time. And God used it to hone down my edges, well, really, to beat them down, because that’s what it felt like when the same child came in every morning and asked for crackers and juice because there was no food in the house for weeks at a time. And that teenager, sullen, sulky, grumpy most of the time, smiled gloriously when he got his crackers and juice as if he’d been served Eggs Benedict and a mimosa from Limoges and Waterford. And I smiled gloriously because I’d made him happy.
I stayed at the school for three years, and I loved those kids – most of them. Some of them loved me, some of them not so much. But I learned what I needed to learn – I think: my life might look a world away from yours, but my heart shouldn’t.
The Unexpected Life 