For a Teacher's Heart: Messages from the Father's Heart.

By Keisha A. Mitchell, PhD

Teachers, more than any other professional group, understand the struggles that students face daily to learn, both children and adults. Teachers, experts of their own disciplines, must also daily work with the personality of every student in order to ensure that they attain sufficient standards to graduate to the next level.
However, with the increasing number of violent incidents in schools across the globe, and the increasing challenges that students face in their communities, teachers need help!
This 21-day devotional is just for you. It is not a prescription telling you what to do, because you already do all of it. But it is fuel in the tank for your soul. It is a private diary that you can use daily to sustain you wherever you are on this journey with your students. The meditations are progressive, but they can also stand alone whenever you need specific help.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jun 14, 2018
• ISBN: 9781387883134

Book preview

For a Teacher's Heart: Messages from the Father's Heart.

FOR A TEACHER’S HEART: Messages from the Father’s Heart

Keisha A. Mitchell, PhD

© 2018

Lulu Press

ISBN 978-1-387-88313-4

DEDICATION

To every teacher who has ever faced school violence – whether it be guns, drugs, or gangs!  All your students honour you because you keep getting up to lift us up, again, and again, and again.

Thank you!

INTRODUCTION

⁹ Jesus answered: Don’t you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? ¹⁰ Don’t you believe that I am in the Father, and that the Father is in me? The words I say to you I do not speak on my own authority. Rather, it is the Father, living in me, who is doing his work. ¹¹ Believe me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; or at least believe on the evidence of the works themselves. ¹² Very truly I tell you, whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these, … (John 14: 9-12a, NIV).[1]

Have you ever seen the movie, Facing the Giants?  It is the story of Grant Taylor, a teacher, a high school football coach.  At the start of the movie his life is falling apart and he is hanging on by a thread to every dream that he ever had.  He and his wife have not been able to have the child that they’ve tried for more than four years to have.  The car that he drives keeps breaking down but he cannot afford the repairs much less to replace it.  And, his professional life is about to be cut off because the team that he coaches keeps losing games. 

However, as the pressures mount, he finally explodes in anger at his team members after a most embarrassing defeat.  He chews them out for clowning around on the field and in all their classes at school.  He berates them for making errors on the field that reflect their neglect of the fundamental skills of the game.  Finally, in absolute defeat, he storms out of the locker room.  A few days later he gets to the breaking point when he overhears a private meeting.  Members of the school board, including his friends and fellow coaches, were discussing his poor performance, deciding that he is incapable of doing the job that he was hired to do and so they decide to replace him.

Graham hit the lowest place he had ever hit in his life.  He confronts all his dreams and all the failed hopes.  Soon he realizes that he was losing in life because he had lost sight of the reason that he had become a coach.  He had forgotten why he had chosen to teach.  Once he reconnected to his purpose of preparing these boys for life, then everything changed in his life.  He began to teach the truth from his selfhood.  He taught with integrity because he became one with his subject, so he could transmit that passion to his students (Palmer, 1998).[2]

Well, Fellow Teacher, long before there was a Graham Taylor, and me or you, there was a great teacher who encountered a significant challenge with his students just at the point when he thought that his work with them was finished.  I am speaking of Jesus Christ, the Master Teacher (John 14).

In this chapter of John’s gospel, Jesus has just completed a review of the key lessons that he has spent the last three years teaching his disciples.  He is confident that he has done his job well because he taught his students everything that the Heavenly Father had given him on the syllabus for How to Build the Kingdom of God.  So, after completing the syllabus, Jesus is beginning to prepare them for his impending departure and their final exam. 

After he had completed his review, Thomas just had to ask what is known as the ridiculous question.  Thomas asks Jesus where he is going and directions to get there.  I imagine that Jesus restrained his natural reaction to blink hard, and to have his mouth fall open in amazement.  After a deep breath, he calmly responds to Thomas, telling him the answer to his question.  However, when Jesus thinks that this answer will be the end of the review session, it instead opens up the floodgates to the misunderstandings that still lived in the minds of his students.

Philip asks Jesus to show them the central figure of his mission so that they will all be satisfied.  I can imagine that Jesus cannot control the impulse this time and his eyes get big and round as he responds to Philip’s fundamental question with, Don’t you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? … 

Can you relate to Jesus’ growing concern as he looks at the faces of each of his students wondering just how much of the lessons they actually understood and retained?  Can you relate to his anxiety about how they would perform at the time of their