Flooding Deserts

Irrigating deserts is a great feeling. Imagine the dry parched ground as the water touches its wizened surface. A feeling it had forgotten. The cool refreshing drops awaken the senses. Everything feels new again,rejuvenated and alive.

C.S. Lewis once said, “That the task of modern educators is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts.” I have the honor of rendering water to lives that are parched and don’t even realize they’re thirsty, and just a drop is able to awaken their senses and cause them to come alive. Many of these kids walk into my room dehydrated by life and circumstances that have become their desert biomes. They’ve learned to adapt to a lack of water and “heated” circumstances. Many of them hiding in burrows, and others parading their thick skin. They have learned to live on little, and not to expect too much “watering”. As a teacher I get to change that. I get to offer them the rain. I love my job because I get to irrigate walking deserts. They walk into my room and I get to shower those places that have been unwatered and watch them come alive. These arid places may be academic, social, or emotional— all equally needing to be watered so that they flourish with life and growth and are not brittle, wilted or baked.

Maybe it’s that student that has been raised by a grandmother. Although she does her best, he questions why he doesn’t have his mother like everyone else. It has made him angry, made him find comfort in food and made him a target (due to his weight) for all the other kids. For four years, he has been picked on, laughed at and his emotions have hardened. He walks into my classroom and I can see the cracks. He has bought into the lie that he “needs” nothing because he has learned to “survive” on so little. Everyday he comes in and within minutes he is making himself vomit on his desk. Why? Because he wants out of the desert—he is trying to escape from that place that is sucking the little bit of life that is left in him out. With every disgusting look, laugh, name…he is shriveling. It’s painful to watch, but I know the watering he needs. Don’t get me wrong, the task is not easy and one bucket of water is not going to do the trick. In fact, many buckets of water will just be repelled because he has become hydrophobic. It will take special measures of watering to get through the damaged soil. Oh but the joy that rushes in when you see his emotions start to come alive— that first day he doesn’t make himself throw up, that first hug he gives, that day you watch his classmates decide to stand up for him and even help him earn his recess time back. It’s then that you know the soil is moistening and that life is being restored.

Or maybe it’s that student that’s striving so hard but still failing. She is defeated and desperately trying to measure up to her best friend's success. I’m watch her lose her confidence with every D or F, she is withering and I’m doing everything I can to keep her hope from drying up and going drab. Then suddenly, I realize there’s a kink in the hose and as we unravel it together I see her soak in the refreshing waters as if it’s her last chance. All she needed was a tool that worked for her, she needed to be able to read and think out loud. She needed to be able to leave all the distractions of a room and talk herself through it. When she came out of the room, there was a difference, a new found confidence, and it was on display in the As and Bs she was now able to reach.

These are just a few examples of dried up places that I have had the joy of irrigating. As I shower students everyday with encouragement, compassion, mercy and love that they may be lacking, I remember the words of George Henry Lewes, “Remember that every drop of rain that falls, bears into the bosom of the earth a quality of beautiful fertility.” This is how I change the world. I shower the young earth with what it needs and give it the opportunity to grow and produce for the world around it.