I’ve been reading John Ortberg’s If You Want To Walk On Water, You’ve Got To Get Out Of The Boat. Chapter 3 is about your calling, what God wants you to do with the gifts He gave you.
God wants me to realize teaching is not my calling. And He’s not shy about beating me over the head with it:
If Palmer had taken the job, think of what the results would have been in his life: fatigue, discouragement, a loss of joy, lack of energy, and a sense of inadequacy. This is one of the causes of what psychologists have come to call the “imposter phenomenon” — the sense that people (especially successful people) often have of spending too much time and effort trying to conceal their inadequacy from others. If he were like most of us, Palmer then would have been tempted to think that the problem was that he had joined a dysfunctional organization, or that the board had let him down, or that he had a troublesome faculty.
Or, if Palmer were a teacher instead of the president of this educational institution, he would have been “tempted to think” the students were rude, disrespectful and apathetic, the counselors were inept, the administration was antagonistic, and the faculty was stagnated, bitter, and burned out.
While some of those things may be true, the bigger fact is that I am in the wrong job.
I already quit teaching once, May 2006. Then I couldn’t get another job (for a variety of reasons), so I went back to teaching. I thought the problem was I was not an elementary-school teacher, that if I went back to high school I’d be okay. Turns out I was wrong.
Back in December I was pretty sure I was wrong, and each day, since I’ve allowed myself to tell myself that this is not where I need to be, I’ve felt more and more strongly that I need to GET OUT. But I can’t, until June. But that’s a topic for another blog post.
Now that I know what my calling is not, I need to figure out what it is. I still want to be involved in education, just not in the classroom (for my sake and the students’.)
