Carrying Death With You

So Lead Teach is finally over. I have come to the end of a three week grind all on my own in the classroom. The first two weeks felt like business as usual. Nothing shocking, nothing overly challenging. I pushed on and on and on.

The first sign that things were wrong was the fatigue. Constant fatigue. By 8 PM I was an entirely useless person. I babble. I whine. My wife sends me to bed. I collapse on the couch and flop like a fish. This is not an exaggeration.

I would be done with soccer conditioning or the gym around 5:30, shower up, have dinner with my wife, and then have about an hour or two at max before I became a toddler again. I needed sleep.

However, on the last week, the stress of it all seemed to finally catch me. By Tuesday I was beginning to despair as whether or not I was making any difference. I was beginning to have bigger and bigger issues in the classroom. I was dreading going in on Wednesday. I called up my coach and we debriefed for about an hour, trying to sort out my emotions. He built me up and sent me out.

Wednesday was also rough. I string of dropped balls and rowdy students. It was Wednesday that I finally asked myself the question, "Can I really do this? Why am I here?"

"God did not call you to Memphis to make you a great teacher. God called you to Memphis to die to yourself." 

An innocent statement that I heard last summer from an MTR Grad from the Class of 2013. Die to yourself. These words have haunted me. I am here to die. I know it has been coming. It inches towards me. I felt it some days last year that soon I would I have to die to myself. Soon I would have to give everything over to God. Soon I would have to stop holding back. That day is coming ever closer.

Of course I envision the worst of that day. I envision that I will be the slave to my students, to my job, to my God. I will be no more. No more Magic and card playing. No more board games and company. No more reading for pleasure. No more lazy mornings with my wife. No more impromptu cuddling with her either. No more Netflix. No more goofing off. Slave. Slave. Slave. Death.

This reflects my image of God. It reflects my understanding of Love. It reflects my heart.

C.S. Lewis describes death like this in his 31st Screwtape Letter:
"Of course. It always was like this. All horrors have followed the same course, getting worse and worse and forcing you into a kind of bottle-neck till, at the very moment when you thought you must be crushed, behold! you were out of the narrows and all was suddenly well. The extraction hurt more and more and then the tooth was out. The dream became a nightmare and then you woke. You die and die and then you are beyond death. How could I ever have doubted it? ... Pains he may still have to encounter, but they embrace those pains. They would not barter them for any earthly pleasure. All the delights of sense, or heart, or intellect, with which you could once have tempted him, even the delights of virtue itself, now seem to him in comparison but as the half nauseous attractions of a raddled harlot would seem to a man who hears that his true beloved whom he has loved all his life and whom he had believed to be dead is alive and even now at his door."

Insane right? Compare his description to mine. Who is more afraid of death? Who is more afraid of pain?

While I have been struggling, I have been reading, I have been begging God to help me and counsel me. I have been praying and reflecting. Tuesday God led me to 2 Corinthians 4. I should have known it was a warning and a comfort. I have now written down 2 Corinthians 4:8-12 just about everywhere so that I will not forget it. Here it is: "We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed. We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body. For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that his life may also be revealed in our mortal body. So then, death is at work in us, but life is at work in you."

So I carry death with me. I am constantly given over to the death I carry along with me. However, because of this death I am able to have life in me. The resurrection in me. Christ in me. Without the Death I cannot have the resurrection. This corpse in my arms is showing me how to have life in my heart. This corpse is humbling me. It is teaching me. The corpse is in all of our arms, crushing us unless we find the life in Christ. I must accept the corpse I carry and then I can be alive in Christ once more. While it may weigh me down, I am crushed, but not pressed. I am struck down, but not destroyed. I am killed, but I am risen.

So whether I like it or not, I am carrying a corpse in my weak arms.

And the corpse is me.