The Stripping Away

It might have been a mistake to keep using the same day planner.

I like to plan ahead, you see, which means that these days, when I turn the page in my planner, I see depressing things like “Sports Day” and “Boot Sale” and “Remember to announce April’s House winner.” Little reminders, all over the place, of what I’ve lost. So I cross those things out and write in “Video call, 8:00” because what else is there to write in my planner these days?

Remember that scene in Back to the Future Part II when Biff goes back in time to give the Almanac to his younger self and it skews the future so that when Marty returns to 1985 he finds himself in an alternate universe? That’s what this feels like, right? An alternate universe. And one day I’ll wake up from this bad dream and look at my planner and it really will be Sports Day. Where is Doc with his time machine when you need him?

There simply is not enough space here to express how much I hate this alternate universe. Not because my conditions are miserable (because they are not; we are enjoying time with extended family), but because I am being stripped of the parts of me that I have valued the most.

You might recall that recently I wrote an entire post on how much I love crossing things off of lists. Finishing a task gives me a thrill. You want to know how many tasks I can’t finish right now? About a bazillion. Like, that whole three-year commitment to being principal at a school that I have invested in for almost 20 years? Yeah, that little thing. Don’t get to cross it off my list. Sure, I’m still frantically working, but I feel like I’m in a hamster wheel.

I’m a perfectionist. I like to do things well. I like to do things on time. I despise procrastination. I never once pulled all-nighter in college. Yet now? I feel like I’m always 10 hours behind. That would be because I am 10 hours behind. I wake up in the morning in California and it’s already evening in Tanzania. A few times in my childhood, I experienced that sinking feeling that everyone had already turned in their homework assignment except me. Those experiences still give me nightmares. Now, I wake up every single morning, open my computer, and get that same feeling.

My sense of isolation and disconnection is exacerbated by the fact that I have teachers living in four locations spanning ten time zones and students in even more. I walk around these California neighborhoods and see the signs posted on lawns, “We love Mrs.______!” for Teacher Appreciation Week, but I can’t do that for my teachers. My teachers are working their tails off, logging in dozens more hours a week than usual, with a fraction of the rewards that come from teaching physical children in a physical classroom. They are teaching during odd hours so that they can help groups of kids on opposite sides of the world. And I can’t even give them a stupid sign on their lawns. I hate being mediocre. Yet these days, that’s all I’ve got to offer.

Of course, alongside running in my own hamster wheel, I’m also helping my children with Distance Learning, which means that I too am bordering on the edge of my sanity. If anyone was enviously thinking that Mrs. Medina must be doing such a fabulous job with Distance Learning since she’s the principal and Perfectly Patient All of the Time, well, I guess it’s a good thing you can’t visit me so that I don’t completely decimate my reputation. Last week Johnny started crying during one particularly tense exchange over spelling words and he wailed, “Everything was better in Tanzania!” So then I started crying too. Me too, Buddy. I want out of this alternate universe. (I may or may not have offered to pay a million dollars to Johnny’s second grade teacher to come to California and teach him.)

It’s like we’re all working twice as hard but with half of the productivity, which is probably why I feel frustrated 92% of the time. Did I mention I really like productivity? Efficiency, productivity, perfectionism, planning. All of those things have been thrown out of the window, and since they were my most-cherished values, I feel like jumping out along with them.

I know better, of course. I know that what I’m supposed to think is that all of my values–as good as they are–still must submit themselves to God’s will. That God doesn’t really care about my efficiency and productivity as much as I do, and that as those “values” are being stripped away from my heart, the revealed flesh that is underneath sits raw and exposed before God. I am nothing without Him. I do no good other than the good He does through me. I accomplish nothing of value other than what He deems is important. I know I’m supposed to think that, but my flesh wrangles and wrestles and beats up against it.

I know that He wins in my weakness. I need to give up this fight.

At the start of the school year, I planned out all of the elementary school Bible verses for whole year. Providentially, the verse that was scheduled for the week of March 23 (when everything fell apart) was Proverbs 19:21: Many are the plans in a person’s heart, but it is the Lord’s purpose that prevails. 


So there you have it. What I wrote in my planner was just that–My Plan and nothing more. It was just ink on paper, a fantasy that was never meant to exist. This isn’t an alternate universe, it is The Plan, the one that was meant to be from the beginning of time. Any control I thought I had was just an illusion.

It’s ironic that I started this job as principal flat on my face, feeling like a complete failure, and now here I am again, ending the job in a similar way. At the beginning, I fell apart with anxiety, not knowing if had what it takes to do well. Now I know I can, but instead of running past the finish line, I have to limp there, my feet chained together with a world crisis. I look back now and know that starting in weakness was incredibly good for me–that it set the stage for the humility and God-dependence I would need for this season. So why can’t I trust Him with the ending as well?