A Teacher's Devotional

Invitation

My students showed me a picture the other day. It was a picture of my then-girlfriend (now wife) and me wearing clothes we had bought at a thrift store and had worn to a university event. The outfits were very… orange. These are, I suppose, the hazards of choosing to teach at the university where you were an undergraduate.

I did have a fantastic time as an undergraduate, not just because of the fashion options available, but because I was able to take courses about interesting things from interesting teachers. I’m not exactly sure when I realized that my teachers weren’t just my teachers but also the scholars who helped produce some of what we were learning. It must have been quite early, because the invitation to work on research was one of the reasons I ended up at Andrews instead of another school.

I was actually on my way to that school when I stopped on campus (at my parents’ suggestion) to talk to a professor about what Andrews could offer. He told me that one opportunity for students at Andrews was that undergraduates could work on research projects with university researchers.

I ended up taking that invitation. I came to Andrews instead of the other school, and applied to be an undergraduate researcher after my sophomore year. I won’t claim that I was the best undergraduate researcher—I struggled with some of the basic lab techniques and didn’t collect a lot of data. But I did learn a lot about myself and my ability to tackle difficult tasks, invent solutions to problems, and keep trying when things didn’t work. I might not have changed the discipline with my undergraduate project, but the discipline of being a scholar changed me.

Teaching involves inviting people to do difficult things so that they will be changed by doing the work. Teaching also involves doing difficult things that continue to shape us as we do the work alongside our students.

Paul, in 1 Corinthians, uses an athletic analogy to explain the lengths to which he was willing to go to teach others about Christ (1 Cor. 9:24-27). But wrapped up in his willingness to do difficult things was the invitation for the Corinthian church to join him. Paul isn’t doing the work so that he can win—he’s trying to save whomever he can “by all possible means” (1 Cor. 9:22) and doing it all “for the sake of the gospel, that I may share in its blessings” (1 Cor. 9:23).

When Paul teaches, he doesn’t repeat the same thing to everyone he meets. He improvises, figures out how to meet people at their starting line, and then invites them into a race that he is running, too. The work of sharing the Gospel is also shaping him. He does it “that I may share in its blessings.” This is one of the gifts of Christian teaching: an invitation to our students to do disciplinary work and Gospel work—to do both, together. It’s an invitation to be changed by the work that continues to change us.

As we approach mid-term grades, you have certainly asked your students to do difficult things. They may be struggling with their first attempts (like I did for two years of undergraduate research). But every student who makes an honest attempt has entered the work we invited them into. That’s cause for celebration.

Read and Recall: 1 Cor. 9:23

Sing or Listen: Take My Life and Let It Be, SDA Hymnal #330

Pray: “Lord, help me invite my students into work that changes us.”