My Absence

It’s a little difficult to start writing again after taking a break for two months.

But I’ll give it a shot.

Maybe it would be appropriate to start with a couple of reasons explaining my absence on this blog.

Firstly, I’ve been and still am undergoing a period of wrestling in my relationship with God and the Church. By His grace and mercy, my pride with respect to the Church has been systematically torn down, and I’m about ready and willing to seek to serve my brothers and sisters in Christ once more, without the taint of disillusionment and a sense of futility.

There is but one person who deserves our trust and who is able to handle the overwhelming expectations and pressure that comes with it. That person is not anyone in the Church, our lovers, our parents, our best friends or even ourselves, for we are all too frail and imperfect. Left to our own devices, we cannot help but destroy that which is beautiful in this world. We only need to take a look at the environment, at our bodies and our relationships.

I thank my Father that He has patiently reminded me again and again, all through my rebellion and rage, that blessed are those who take refuge in Him.

Only in Him.

Anyway, when my relationship with Him is out of whack, I neither have the desire nor the ability to write well. And if I can’t write well, then there’s really no point.

Secondly, This first term in Cedar in 2007 has been the most taxing one in my brief career in education. I’ve been telling anyone who has bothered to ask why I’ve been looking so rundown and grumpy that I felt more exhausted at the end of the first term than I have in my first one and a half years combined.

It wasn’t mere hyperbole either.

I can’t remember the last time I’ve fallen sick so often in the space of three months.

There are a few reasons for my exhaustion:

My workload has actually increased from last year, in terms of actual teaching hours, the number of levels I’m teaching, CCA responsibilities and committee work. While I’m not complaining about the amount of work I’ve been given, it’s taken me some time to get used to the transition.

- I’ve also realised in the past few months that I draw most, if not all, of my strength and joy in teaching from the relationships I form at school, both with colleagues and with students.

Cedar being the insanely active school that it is, many of my fellow teachers are equally as worn down, if not more so, than me, which means there isn’t much time for meaningful and purposeful interaction. It might not affect some people very much, but, for me at least, it’s a real dampener in terms of morale and motivation.

The greater reason, to be painfully honest, is that I feel rather alienated from my students this year.

For what reasons exactly, I’ll elucidate further in another post.

- And as I’ve already elaborated upon in the first section of this post, when my relationship with God is wonky, everything else in my life is wonky. Oftentimes, that translates to a stubborn persistence in doing things on my own strength, instead of His.

So it’s no wonder really why I was burnt out at the end of the first term.

I’m back and I hope to post a lot more frequently from here on out.

The primary purpose of this blog has always been to remind and to reveal to those who are reading it, especially my students, that under the veneer of the various roles I have to play each day and under the unbearable walls of masks, superficiality and silence that we humans like to put up between ourselves, lies a broken and vulnerable sinner, who has and continues to experience the amazing grace of the one true God, and is trying his best to live out the reality of His grace in his life daily.

I lay open my heart once more.