Alejandrina

I thought she was a boy when I first met her.  She walked into class with careless confidence, wearing a cub scout shirt, and a headband which kept her 2 long braids in place.  She had that free spirit thing going, which has always simultaneously drawn me to a person, and also made me jealous.  

Almost immediately, the teasing and taunting started.  Kids were mean, and no one wanted to be her friend.  I wasn't sure why, except different is bad, and Alejandrina was different.  Unlike the predominantly Alaskan Native class, she was loud, gregarious, and breezy.  She was comfortable in her own skin and as a newcomer, an outsider to a class who had been together since Kindergarten, maybe that was too much.  Our class was not kind to her.

As adults in a politically correct society, we purpose to be good at inclusion and acceptance.  In the church, we teach it and value it and tell ourselves we are good at it. When we invite someone to an event that we might not ordinarily invite, we think we've been inclusive.  When we reach out to someone outside of our circle of friends and bring them into the conversation or the group, we feel good about ourselves, and go to bed without guilt.  Maybe because we did more than others in our group, and so our comparison frees us to feel charitable.

But sometimes I wonder how the Alejandrinas of our workplaces and churches and small groups truly feel.  Do they notice that we are nice to them at church, but never seek their company outside of it?  Do they feel like a project of ours or do they feel loved unconditionally? Are they grateful for any kindness, or do they resent token love which holds a promise of something deeper, but never quite comes to fruition?  Are they grateful for mentorship, but wonder why they aren't good enough just to be our friend?

All of us are "different" in some context.  All of us have been that new person, or the one who sticks out, the one not quite like the others.  That feeling of being the one at odds has a strong effect on the psyche.  Stay too long the outsider, or the dissenter, or the newbie, and you start to wonder what's wrong with you, when in completely different contexts the people who make up the majority might be the "different" ones.  The need to fit in is a strong force, which can crush a spirit if left unfulfilled.

From what my parents tell me, Alejandrina's parents wore the "different" label too. Perhaps their well-traveled lives had been far more diverse than those of ours in isolated SE Alaska.  Perhaps their educational ideas were different than those of the conservative high school where they briefly taught.  Maybe they dressed differently, like their daughter.

My friend Alejandrina's family did not last long in Sitka.  Sadly, they did not last long in this world. Their experience of not being accepted made them easy targets for a group who would accept them, and would include them.  They became a part of the infamous Jonestown cult led by Jim Jones.  We understand they died in Georgetown amongst many others.

I've thought about Alejandrina many times over the years.  I loved everything about her, because she was my complete opposite.  Had we more time, I can just imagine the many adventures we might have had.  If life had given me daughters, one of them would have borne her name.

RIP, friend.  I accepted you.  Our friendship was real.  You mattered in this world and you inspire me still.

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photo credit: AlexandraGalvis via photopin cc

Accusation

3D Judges Gavel

http://www.stockmonkeys.com/

I have a lot of crazy stories from my NYC teaching days.  I rarely take them out and share them because I could “one up” my colleagues a lot if I did, but sometimes I tell them to my boss and we enjoy them for the war stories they are.

Plain everyday living in New York is hard.  New Yorkers get a bad rap for their apparent rudeness, but what most call rude is really just abrupt.  There is a need to save time in the city, because no matter the method of commute, most New Yorkers spend at least 2 hours round-tripping back and forth to work, on a good day..  One winter when my car was snowed under, I spent 5 hours a day traveling.  It was a nightmare.  With this reality, too much “nicety”, too much friendliness actually becomes rude to native New Yorkers or those who have assimilated. I remember being home in Sitka one summer.  My mom and I walked down Main Street, which is a 5 minute walk if you stretch it out.  Everyone was acting really weird.  They didn’t know me, and yet they were SMILING at me.  I remember being so frustrated.  “Didn’t they realize how rude that was?  Didn’t they know how long it took for me to stop and smile back at them?”

In addition to long commutes, the city had a way of making so many things we take for granted in Washington State hard.  Including teaching.  One year, I had a little girl who was struggling.  I did the usual things to support her, but failed to sense how intense her mom would take my every word, writing each syllable down verbatim, and bringing relatives to conferences as witnesses.  When Mom asked me to talk with her child’s after-school academic tutoring, I happily called them, until they began a full court marketing press maneuver, at which point, I ended communication with them.  Despite school policy which forbade it, Mom would sneak her daughter in a side door late, and then proceed to stand outside my door and watch me teach for up to an hour.

After 2 or 3 amiable conversations concerning her child, never having complained to me, the mom wrote a 5-page complaint against me and sent it to our principal, the district office, and the chancellor’s office.  5 pages!  The letter alleged among other things, that “Miss Truitt set out to deliberately destroy my daughter’s self-esteem.”  I was very grateful to be fortunate enough to have a student teacher that year who could vouch for my actions.  The complaint was never taken seriously.  And the letter was so crazy and unlike my character, that it didn’t shake me up too much.  I kept the letter for years, as a souvenir of NYC teaching, as a badge of honor, and as a reminder that teaching would never be quite so hard again.

A 5-page letter filled with lies wasn’t hard to shake off.  (It might be now, but back then, I lived in a studio the size of a nice bathroom, and considered dental floss a luxury.   I had bigger problems.). But what if the letter had contained truth?  What if it recorded every thoughtless word I spoke to a child?  What if it recorded the times that year I had lost my temper?  Or the times I had argued with a colleague (EVERYONE argues in NY.  It’s like required or something.). What then?  Would it have been so easy to dismiss?

No, it would have devastated me.  I would have felt the full weight of my guilt.  I think it’s every teacher’s worst nightmare that a parent might show up and yell at them for real transgressions.  Luckily, most adults realize we all live in glass houses. 

It’s easy for me to sit in judgment of this misguided mom for her criticalness and rock throwing, but honestly, don’t we do the same thing to one another?  We think that our brother or sister has a blind spot and if we just tell them, the big light bulb will come on over their head, they will magically change because they were just waiting for our wisdom, and they will forever after live lives of quiet gratitude to us for showing them the way.  We don’t see the years they’ve sought the Lord with tears for freedom for the exact thing we think we are revealing to them.  We don’t know how far they've already come, or much progress they’ve already made.  Or maybe,  we have no idea what a struggle it is for them just to have enough money for the month to eat every day. 

We confront in friendships, because we feel entitled to be heard.  We have heard the adage, “You teach people how to treat you, “and have taken it to heart and want to educate our friends about our hurts, our triggers, our exact Meyer-Briggs personality, and how they should respond to us.  They must be fluent in our love language (Never mind that love languages are a man-made construct) and need honest feedback when they've erred.

We believe we should be entitled to give input on every decision of our local church.  Why is the stage painted black?  No one consulted me.  How will that effect depressed people?  What?  No volleyball this year at the picnic?  But the best players moved away, our house church might finally be able to win.  Why was church cancelled because of a few snowflakes?  Andreson was clear . . .  There was church?  Someone could have been killed by all the crazies on the road who don’t know how to drive in snow.  And on and on.

If you’re at all like me, you’re now thinking of some of the most critical people you know.  If you’re like me, you didn’t look in the mirror. 

But lately? I’ve hurt people close to me by my judgments and criticism, way more than I would like to face.  I’ve handed people invisible scripts, and expected them to follow along.  When they can’t keep up, I let them know my disappointment in their performance.  Over and over.  There’s little worse than facing someone you love realizing the pain you've planted in them is so deep, it can be forgiven but not extracted.  That only God can undo the harm you’ve done.  And that it will take time.

I’m learning that God doesn’t watch Oprah.  He doesn’t read all the friendship quotes on Pinterest which offer really dumb and bitter advice for AFTER you’ve already blown the friendship.  He says, “Treat others how you want to be treated.” Not “teach people how to treat you.”

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been getting it backwards for a long time.  

The God in Heaven Laughs

By Joe Sarembe from Pfungstadt, Germany (Abends am Meer) [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Ok, this is one of my all-time favorite stories.  It won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but I’m pretty sure my friend Tammii will love it.  Mom, you might want to stop reading.

When I was young in the Lord, I didn’t know what I didn’t know.  I didn’t know hearing God’s voice was supposed to be hard.  I didn’t know that I needed to read up on how to pray so I could do it right.   I had a burden for a friend, so I asked the Holy Spirit to help me.  I asked Him to teach me to pray.  For a summer I committed to pray an hour a day just for this friend. 

My friend was the most immoral person I had (and have) ever met.  He was convinced that he was apostate and before the summer was over, he about made a believer of everyone he knew.  He also had an almost Charles Manson-like ability to bed women.  In a given week, he might sleep with 2-3 different people.  (I can almost hear the men reading this laughing in disbelief and imagining my naïveté.)  It was a small town.  I knew the girls. 

I don’t remember everything I learned in prayer that summer. But what I did learn is that God is not uptight, and that He has a sense of humor.  I was praying one day and felt the Lord say, “Plead the blood of Jesus over him.  Over every part.”  So I began.  I pleaded the blood over his mind, over his heart, over his limbs, over his feet---kind of like I’d learned to apply the armor of God to myself.  When I was done, I heard God say, “I said every part.” 

I was a little embarrassed, but it was God, and back then I didn’t know to question His voice and wonder if it was just me.  So I did what I knew He was asking.  I pled the blood of Jesus over my friend’s penis.  (I can say that word thanks to a few colleagues and friends.  You know who you are.  Ahem.)

Later that week, I ran into my friend.  A little tongue in cheek, I asked how his “love life” was. 

He was impotent. 

I think it’s high time I left the books, and the doubts.  I want to learn to pray again with the one who makes me laugh.