During one of my observations at Tukwila Elementary last week, I got to have a feast of plastic food delivered to me by a kindergarten student who has Down syndrome. We became fast friends and I had the best meal ever... :) One of the many perks of school visits.
My intern's mentor teacher snapped these pictures below:
While this was not the purpose of my visit (as I had come to do an observation of my SPU intern), I knew this was indeed the reason I came that day and that I was walking on holy ground.
It reminded me of when Henri Nouwen wrote of a conversation which helped him think about interruptions as something other than a bother. He writes, “While visiting the University of Notre Dame, where I had been a teacher for a few years, I met an older experienced professor who had spent most of his life there. And while we strolled over the beautiful campus, he said with a certain melancholy in his voice, "You know . . . my whole life I have been complaining that my work was constantly interrupted, until I discovered that my interruptions were my work."
What if we saw interruptions as a gift? What if, instead of resisting them out of frustration, we saw them as an opportunity to be open to God?
Nouwen went on to be transformed by the professor’s statement. He later wrote, “It has been the interruptions to my everyday life that have most revealed to me the divine mystery of which I am a part . . . All of these interruptions presented themselves as opportunities . . . invited me to look in a new way at my identity before God. Each interruption took something away from me; each interruption offered something new.”
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