The "Beauty" of Supervision

The Beauty of Supervision

Today, I had a rush of childhood memories flood back into my mind as I sat in my fourth-grade classroom amidst a group of seven students. We had a group project to undertake in History today, and the curriculum only accounted for 6 students to be in a group. In a class with 7 students, I knew that a curriculum plan for 6 would be a no-go. You simply can’t assign everyone a “job” or a “responsibility” in the group and just let one person off scot-free. So, what did I do?

I had no other choice but to create a position.

The name of the position? “Group Supervisor”

Here’s the description that I made up to go with it: “The Group Supervisor holds the clipboard and the ‘Miss Hill’ signature stamp. Every time the group completes a step of the project correctly, the group supervisor will stamp the checklist and tell the group to keep going.”

Pretty lame idea, right? I thought no one would’ve went for it.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

The kids loved it.

They even began discussing who would get to do the “supervisor” job for our project tomorrow before we even had a chance to start our project for today.

What exactly did the “supervisor” do?

The same thing every supervisor does.

The same thing my siblings did to me growing up.

“You do the work, and I’ll supervise.”

What kid doesn’t LOVE that idea?

Supervising is fun.

Holding a clipboard with a fancy stamp is even “funner.”

Doing practically nothing while everyone else is busy is perhaps the “funnest” of all.

------------Enter flashback flood of childhood memories--------------

When I was a young girl, my sister and I shared a bedroom. When I say we "shared a bedroom," that's really a loaded phrase that also goes on to include everything from the sharing of toys and clothes to closet space and cleaning up, etc. Several times, we did the infamous “you get this half of the room, I get this half of the room” scenario. Sometimes, the line was imaginary and therefore very flexible. Sometimes, it was very tangible and pretty much un-cross-able.

My sister and I are four years apart. We did and do all the regular things sisters do; but, at the end of the day, we get along quite nicely. Always have, really. Because of this, we didn't really have a problem sharing toys when we were younger. We're about the same size now, so we still have no problem sharing clothes. (Although, I will admit that I went through a season of life where I only got complimented when I wore HER clothes. Go figure. haha)

But life wasn’t always a room full of Roses (pun intended), my sister Rosie and I did have a handful of disagreements. As far as I remember, the only thing we really disagreed upon was cleaning up OUR room.

You see, it wasn’t that we didn’t want to clean our room…. it’s just…. well, neither one of us thought it was OUR responsibility to do the cleaning. Somehow, my sister always seemed to be the messy one. (Ask her, and I’m willing to bet that she’d give you a different side of that story.) When it came to cleaning up OUR room, that meant SHE needed to get it together because MY side was already clean. Haha… Or. So. I. Claimed.

The problem with that was she claimed the same thing. It wasn’t HER business to clean up MY mess.

So there we stood. In a messy bedroom. Waiting.

And for quite a while, nothing ever happened. The mess continued to exist.

But it didn’t always go down that way.

I do remember one time we chose to embrace the task of “cleaning” our room together by getting super silly about it. As I recall it, we stacked up all the clothes in our room we could find that didn’t have a home in their proper places in the closet or chest of drawers, and built the “Tower of Babel” as we so-quickly-and-oddly named it (such Biblical role players we were…haha), and we then proceeded to slide down this massive pile of clothes in the middle of our room as if we were on a slide in a playground instead of in the middle of cleaning a ridiculously-messy room. For a moment in time, it wasn’t “her mess” or “my mess.” It was “our memory-maker.”

To this day, I’m still unsure how that stack of clothes got so big. I’m pretty sure we were still wearing size 6x clothes at this point in time. Mom must have struck an incredible sale at Mervin’s or something.

And, to tell the truth, I have no clue how the stack of clothes got its name “The Tower of Babel.” I’m pretty sure no one left the room speaking a different language.

While we’re talking about it, I’m still very unclear as to if/how the room ever got cleaned that day. But that’s okay by me. Some days are more about the collecting up memories than cleaning up messes. And memories last a lot longer than messes, anyway. That’s pretty reassuring, if you ask me, because our messes sometimes did last for quite a long while.

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I don’t know if it was Roseann or if it was one of my other siblings; but somewhere along the bumpy path called childhood, one of the Hill siblings became famous coining the phrase, "You do the work, and I'll supervise!"

I always seemed to be the one on the receiving end of that statement, and I never liked it very much. Something about that equation doesn’t add up – unless you’re the "supervisor."

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Lately, I’ve been reading a book entitled “Love Does” by Bob Goff.

It sounds simple enough.

Because it is simple enough.

The main premise is that love is active and not passive.

Love.

Does.

Love cleans up messes – even when the mess isn’t “ours.”

Love does the work and lets others supervise. Without complaining.

Love lays down the clipboard and the stamp and gets in on the project.

Love eventually tears down the “Tower of Babel” and folds the clothes.

We all have messes in our lives, and we all see/know others who have messes in their lives as well. We’re all living-History-projects-of-sorts. At the end of the day, our messes may be packaged differently, but we all have the same options for how we handle them:

1. We can chose to push it off on others, do nothing about it, and wait-it-out. Hoping – and praying even – that someday “they” will see the errors of “their” ways and make things right and clean in our lives. My sister and I chose that approach many times as kids sharing a messy bedroom. Nothing good ever came out of it. The mess just seemed to grow with time.

2. We can let others “do all the work” on the messes in our lives while we just sit back and “supervise.” We can go-to-town stamping the clipboards of our made-up checklists for others to match up to. It may feel powerful for a little while, and it may even seem cool for a little while longer. But (much like the History project in my classroom) the roles of the project will soon change, how would you want the person holding the clipboard to treat you tomorrow? The same way you judged them today?

3. We can choose the path less traveled, walk out the path of MOST resistance, and feel the weight of what it truly means to love others in the midst of their messes like Christ loves the mess inside each one of us. We can choose to love. Love always does something about the mess. Love does.

I wonder... what MESS do you need to DO something about today? Is it yours? Is it someone else's? Was it a result of a joint-effort? At this point in the game, it really matters not.
There is beauty, fame, and fortune found in supervision, for sure. 
But love is a more clear picture of Christ to the world around us.

And love does.

- In closing -

Thank you, sister, for cleaning “the” mess (I’m still not owning it 100%... haha) out of “our” room, and thank you, even more, for loving the mess out of me.

Some of my most fond memories come from the messes I found myself in with you.  :-)

Group Work, Dividing and Conquering, and a Relationship that Doesn't Work that Way

The strangest thing happened in my classroom today.

Granted, it was Valentine’s Day. Mustaches and mustache jokes were running rampant.

If I had a nickel for every time I heard, “I mustache ask you to be mine” followed by a classroom full of giggles, I’d be a pretty rich teacher today. It never got old. Seriously, it was funny every time it was said. I’m dearly-so-thankful that my kiddos have such an overall FUN sense of humor. I don’t know what I’d do if they didn’t.

Aside from all of the excitement of our sugar-filled day, the strangest thing happened in my classroom. For Math lesson today, the kids were given multiplication and division facts all jumbled up. After they figured out the missing numbers, they were supposed to match up the multiplication and corresponding division problems and label them as a “multiplication match.” (Yes, it was complete with hearts – just to give it a Valentine-y edge. :)) For this activity, I put them into partner-groups, so they could work together.

And that’s when the strangeness of it all hit me.

As the kiddos were working “together,” I looked around the room and NO ONE was talking. Silence filled the room. In fact, I heard the air conditioner’s automatic switch turn off. And, at one point, I could literally hear my pen drop. As soon as I noticed this, I called attention to it. “Hey kids, you guys are quieter when we work in ‘groups’ than when you guys just work alone. What’s going on with that? Are you guys working together??”

As soon as I asked, the room erupted with solutions, answers, and explanations.

“Yeah, she’s doing the evens, I’m doing the odds.”

“Yeah, I’m doing all the work, and he’s just copying all my answers.” (You gotta love the sheer honesty of children….haha)

Then, a response hit me like the others didn’t:

“Yeah, Miss Hill, she’s doing all the multiplication ones, and I’m doing the division ones because she doesn’t understand those yet.”

For some weird reason, this response made me get a little introspective of myself, my relationship with God, and my prayer life.

Our lives as Christians are a partnership-of-sorts with God Almighty.

Yes, it’s more of a dependence on Him than anything else. A trust. A hope. A full surrender to His work in our lives. But hang with me for a moment. It’s a partnership. Us + God. Rather, I should say, “God + Us.” To quote Philippians 4:13, “I can do all things through Christ which strengthens me.” 

Life, done correctly, is nothing more (and nothing less) than group work with God. We go through this thing called life as a team. If done appropriately, open lines of communication should be flowing at all times and learning and growth take place all throughout our journey while we’re here on Earth.  The Bible encourages us to “pray without ceasing” and to “hide God’s Word in our hearts, so we won’t sin against God.”

The only way to do true group work is to communicate. Not dividing and conquering.

But how many times are we guilty of that in our lives?  I was thinking today… how many times do I “do the multiplication-type problems” of life (a.k.a. the things I can “handle” on my own) and only leave Him to deal with the “division-problems-of-life” (a.k.a. the things I don’t understand or don’t know yet)? Sad, but true.

Yes, dividing and conquering may get the job done… and it may even seem to be more timely to do so. Just as it did with my students today during Math class. The job was done, yes. The answers were filled in on the sheet, yes. “Classroom control” seemed to be at an all-time peak, yes.

But, you know what? My students still have much to learn after today. I now know that one needs to work one not copying others’ answers, (haha!) and I know that another has yet to learn division. But those things hardly concern me. After all, they’re only 9 and 10 years-old, and all of those factors are par for the course of growing up, learning, and giving Miss Hill a fist-full of “teachable moments.” :) (Believe me, we’ll be working on those things throughout the remainder of the year.)

Most of all, though, today in the classroom, I learned that life is like group work. It requires non-stop communication with God Almighty. We simply can’t copy someone else’s life’s work and possibly learn anything or grow into who we need to be from it all. We simply can't work on all of life's "even" factors and dismiss all the "odds." (Wouldn't that be nice, though, if we could? :) )  We can’t simply “handle” the little, easy, everyday stuff, and only pray through the “stuff we can’t handle,” the “stuff we don’t understand,” or “the stuff we don’t know yet.”  

A relationship with God requires group work. And group work requires communication, not dividing and conquering, to be truly successful.

I’m thankful that our relationship with God is based out of His incredible love for us, and His love simply does not operate on dividing, conquering, and a room full of silence.

Today, listen to God. What is He saying to you?

Today, talk to God. What do you need to say to Him?

Open the lines of communication. And let the real kind of group-work-learning-and-growing begin. 

The Rug That Was Never On Sale

Sometimes, I like to make "deals" with God. Don't look at me that way... you know you've done it too. At the very least, you've thought about it. The deals I'm talking about look and sound something like this... "God, if You ______________, then I'll _______________."

Oftentimes, in my own life, these kinds of prayer-deals with God flow from a result of uncertainty and a pure desire to have a "clear sign" from God on which way to go, what decision to make, what to do next, the timescale of when I should act on something, etc.

However, sometimes, these kinds of prayer-deals that I make with God are a result of impatience or a lack of trust on my part. If God gave us all the "clear signs" we asked for, we'd start worshipping the signs and not the One whose very signature is written all over our entire beings. As a common worship song reminds us, "from life's first cry to final breath, Jesus commands my destiny." Jesus' signs don't command our destiny. HE commands our destiny. And I'm thankful it works out that way.

I'm reminded of stories of signs in the Bible and am comforted. Take Gideon for example. He set out a fleece, begged God to make the fleece wet and the ground around it dry as a "sign" for how he should prepare for battle. He asked. He prayed. He prepared for a miracle. God showed up. He delivered. He gave Gideon the exact sign he asked for.

Obedience followed, and that was the end of the story? False. But I'm glad you asked...
Because, you see,...

Gideon didn't stop there. He decided to set the stage for Act 2. On the second night, Gideon boldly asked God for another-yet-similar sign. Apparently, he didn't "get it" the first time. (I'm assuming Gideon was that kid in school that always asked his teacher to repeat something she JUST SAID for the 52nd time.) So, on the second night, Gideon asked God to repeat Himself. But this time, (reversed from the first) make the fleece dry and the ground around it wet as a "sign" for how he should prepare for battle. God answered just as boldly and clearly as Gideon prayed.

God gave Gideon clear, literal signs on what to do. So, my thoughts were/are, "Why would He not also do the same for me?"

So, with all said (and thought out), I decided to make a deal with God.
Mine, too, had something to do with fleeces.... err, modern day fleeces.
Ok, mine has nothing to do with fleeces.... It embarrassingly has to do with a rug from Pier 1 Imports.

So, as crazy as it sounds.... here goes my story:

My parents are in the midst of a never-ending-attempt to remodel our 20+ year old house. Mom's allergic to carpet, so the carpet's now gone. Wood flooring and/or tile is in the process of overthrowing what land was once ruled by carpet.

My room is in transition mode right now, so I've been on the hunt for a cute rug to put in my room until the wood flooring project is completed.
Enter Pier 1 Imports.
I found exactly the rug I wanted. But it's expensive. And I'm a teacher.
Teachers don't buy rugs in Pier 1 - unless they're married to a doctor or a lawyer or a billionaire.
(I'm exaggerating, but you get the idea.)
Teachers don't buy rugs in Pier 1 - unless they're on sale.

So, instead of buying the expensive rug at Pier 1 that day, I did the next logical (or not-so-logical) thing. I made a deal with God. "God, if You put that rug on sale, then I'll _______________."

After the day I made that prayer-deal with God, I visited Pier 1. Often. Religiously, even. So-much-so that one may even say I began rug-sale-stalking the place. Every time I entered, sweet ladies would greet me and ask to help me as I politely declined and made a bee-line to the rug section. And every time I reached the rug section, my heart skipped a beat. Then, seemingly stopped for a second. For, every time I looked, the rug was not on sale.

Let me tell you, the phrase in my mind that completes the above-thought ("God, if You put that rug on sale, then I'll ___________.") isn't just any ordinary phrase. It's a BIG dream of mine. It's something near-and-dear to my little heart. It's a big part of who I am and who I want to one day become for the glory of God. It has a lot to do with my future and where I'm headed in life and love and all things that last in life. It has a lot to do with a lot I need to do and trust God to do, but it has absolutely nothing to do with rugs on sale at Pier 1.

And that's the sheer irony of it all.

Why do we make deals with God anyway? I wonder.

Why do we equate something He can and will do out of His sheer love and pure desire for us with the ridiculousness of our wants, "right now's," and "have to have it's"? Somehow, we taint it by wanting what we want so much and not what He ultimately wants and has planned and waiting for us.

Why did I de-value something God has put in my heart for a long time by equating with a sale for something I should put under my feet? It's absurd to even look back on and think about, now that I think about it.

Finally, this last week, a few days ago, actually, I made one final trip to Pier 1 to check out the rug section and hope for the long-awaited sale.
I entered.
Saleswomen greeted.
Rug = not-on-sale and expensive
I retreated.

As I left Pier 1 the other day and headed out to the parking lot to find my car, the sky opened. As I walked, sprinkle-rain littered down on me. Discouraged from the yet-again-no-rug-sale-disappointment, I thought it was a sure "sign" that all of Heaven was just as upset about the rug not being on sale as I was. {Furthermore, upset that it wasn't the right time for my fill-in-the-blank dream to come true, either. (Remember, "God, if you put that rug on sale, then I will ____________.")}

Apparently that wasn't it.

When I reached my car, I received a much different-yet-super-clear "sign" from God.
A rainbow so-big-you-couldn't-miss it-if-you-tried-to stretched itself across the sky that day.
And it reminded me, of a lot of things, actually.

Of Noah's day. The wickedness of the people, the judgement of God, etc.

But most of all, it reminded me of God's grace.
His goodness.
His promises. and His faithfulness in keeping those promises.

Despite myself, my silly prayer-deal with God, and the rug that was never on sale, God sent me a sign that day.
It was an attention-grabber and a soul-reminder.
It wasn't the sign I was looking for, but it was the sign I needed.
God's faithful. Fair and square.
He's put the dreams I have in my heart, and He'll be the One to see them to completion in my life.
Whether the Pier 1 rug ever goes on sale or not has no bearing.
I probably didn't need it anyway.

With all said, be careful when you put conditions on God, make prayer-deals, or ask for "clear signs."
If you're not careful, you could easily focus a lot of time, energy, and wasted hope on something that would cost you too much and probably belongs under your feet anyway when God's trying to move you on action with the things He's already placed in your heart.

Trust Him with the things you know to be true of Him.
Trust Him with the things He says are true of Him.
Trust Him to fulfill what He says He will fulfill - in His way and in His timing.

Thank Him for the rainbow reminders.
Thank Him, also, for the rugs that never go on sale.