The Rule of Love

     It's one-thirty in the morning and I've been awake for at least an hour. I was going to catch up on sleep, but...
     I took four days off work for some surgery and recovery and thought Friday would be a quiet day back, just to get into the swing of things. Before noon I'd helped get one kid suspended and another well on his way to similar difficulties. It's not that they were little angels, of course. Like teetering rocks at the brink of a cliff they just needed a little push... and I was there to lean on them.
     So the Holy Spirit wakes me up for a little reflection time and I realize how easily I'm pushed over the edge myself, how easily a kid with an attitude sets me off. It's why I work in Special Education--my students have plenty of problems, but they don't have attitudes. So after tossing and turning and realizing sleep has fled, I came here to try and work things out.
    
     I've come to a conclusion that the difference between myself and what I consider a successful teacher must be love. I don't mean ordinary love, an affection for children and belief in their potential. I mean real, converted, Gospel love that changes everything--an avid sense of purpose and direction that engages the world proactively and makes change happen. It's the love of Christ who changed Zaccheus and Matthew and Simon and the leper. It's the love that set the thief free forever, even as he was dying on a cross. It's the love I need if I am to continue following Him...
     There's nothing sappy about this love. There is also nothing weak or timid or uncertain or confused. Even more difficult, there is nothing independent about this love, for it is never my work. It is profoundly surrendered to the will of God, and if there was any identifiable mistake in my choices and actions this long day, it was that I failed to go first to God, to seek and to know His will.
     People who are not on the journey of conversion will never understand that last sentence. I never understood, and even now I have to read it over and over again because the light is only beginning to break through. Francis and Clare's great love was the love of surrender and conversion to love itself, more than a way of life. They accepted love as identity. Like Jesus on Calvary, they became love--and it was all God's doing. Well, it was like getting married: two people deciding to do it together.

     Today was God's proposal. Francis found it when he turned to look back at the leper and "discovered a heart of mercy". Clare found it when she rejected her family's plans for her life and followed the one who occupied all her senses. Both of them found, like me, that it was a life-work. A conscious decision to be converted, with all it brings.
     There will always be difficult children at school, kids on the brink of failure at life. My challenge, I suppose, will be to patrol the edge with ropes of love, to go out and rescue, to intervene, to draw them back, to show them a path of life by the expedient of modeling love. It's not a romantic idea--that would be my weakness. "Love," I heard myself whispering in the darkness, "is patient, kind, does not put on airs." It is meek, tolerant, willing to see more than one side of an issue, slow to anger, rich in mercy, building slowly on respect, never threatened by the long haul. It gets better with age. Love converts. It walks with the truth in its hands. It brings liberty to captives. It sets prisoners free. There is no distance love cannot go, no trial it cannot endure, no burden it cannot take onto its own shoulders. I understand now why God has chosen for me to work in public education. So many opportunities to love. So many opportunities to be converted.
    
     At two a.m. on Saturday morning, I don't have a clue how I will proceed, only faith that yesterday will not be wasted, that the difficulties I experienced are no match to God's will, no match to real love. That what he sees, knows and plans for all of us will come to fulfillment. God rules. Creation follows. That's the plan. And God, Jesus tells us, is love.