Sucker

"...a look at the ancient west African kingdom of Ghana. Read chapter 13 aloud with a partner and then complete the reading notes I have handed out to you. Make sure you-"

The classroom door swung open and in strolled Anthony and Chasen, right in the middle of my sentence.

"No." I said sharply, holding up my finger in their direction. "You stand right there at the door and do not move. My class started fifteen minutes ago and you are late."

The boys backed themselves up against the door.

I finished my instructions to the class and then walked over to Anthony and Chasen. "Somebody had better explain to me why you were not here on time."

"W-w-we were he-helping Miss V-Veronica," Chasen stammered.

"Yeah," Anthony said.

"Then go get a note," I said, pointing to the door. Chasen and Anthony almost fell on each other in an attempt to hurry out.

Fifteen minutes later, they came back. Approaching my desk slowly, Chasen put a piece of paper in my hand.

I examined the note. It was a tiny piece of torn paper taken from the edge of paper from a writing ledger. Scribbled in squiggly childlike pencil letters was the following message:

"Deer Miss Bass pleese exscuse Chasen and Anthony from class they was helping me clean up. Sined, Miss V."

I squinted at the paper. I glared at Chasen and Anthony. "Who wrote this!" I said.

They stared at me, wide-eyed.

"This is not an adult's handwriting!" I said angrily. "Are you telling me Miss Veronica failed spelling? Who forged this note!"

Chasen and Anthony continued to gape at me, no words coming out of their mouths.

"Both of you, out!" I said. "Follow me right now!"

I marched them down the hallway. "We are going to go call both your mothers right now!"

Anthony spun around and grabbed my arm.

"No-no-no w-wait, Miss B-bass, P-p-please," he said. "We are gonna c-c-confess r-right now."

Chasen turned to him with a look of shock on his face. "Aw!" he squeaked indignantly, shaking his head at Anthony.

"No," Anthony said, "We gonna confess." The fear of his mother, stronger than the fear of God, was flooding his eyes with water.

"Wh-wh-what had happened was," Anthony gulped, "I went to get my backpack outside, see, and then I decided to help Chasen find his - "

"Yeah," Chasen said, nodding. "And after we found my backpack we then forgot about class and began eating our chili suckers, you know the ones I sell for twenty-five cent during nutrition-" Chasen looked up at the ceiling and smiled to himself, "that sucker was good too-"

"Chasen!" I snapped. "First of all, you are not supposed to be eating candy-"

"Oh I know," Chasen said nodding at me, sending a dazed stare through my body. "I know but I forgot because that sucker was out cold-"

"Chasen! I don't want to hear about any more suckers!" I hissed. "I want to know who forged Miss Veronica's handwriting!" I looked at Anthony, who had shrunk against the wall and was looking sideways at Chasen, waiting for him to say something.

"Oh yeeeah," Chasen said with a grin, "About that. It was actually both our ideas, but mostly Anthony's."

Anthony gaped at Chasen.

"But I wrote it," he said proudly, "Because I figu-" he paused. "Because we both figured that you would think a child would write in cursive, so we wrote the note in print to throw you off, and make you think we was Miss Veronica because she ain't about to write us no note for eating chili suckers. Wasn't that a good idea, Miss Bass?" he tapped his temple. "Smartness."

I stared at Chasen, speechless. He grinned at me. I looked at his partner. Anthony slumped on the wall, looking betrayed.

My mind raced with possible courses of disciplinary action. Parent-teacher conference? Over lollipops, hard to justify. Detention? Wouldn't exactly help. Call parents? The boys had confessed, even bragged about what they saw as a successful diversion. They confessed nonetheless, and the infraction was not all that serious in the grand scheme of things.

"You both have janitorial duty in my classroom for a week!" I fumed at them. "I better see you in my classroom after school every day this week to clean it up. And if you are late, I promise you I will immediately call your mamas."

Chasen and Anthony nodded gratefully.

"Now get back to class!" I ordered.

* * *

After school, I was outside on the yard watching the kids in the parking lot when I realized that I had forgotten my phone on my desk. I ran upstairs to my classroom, just as Anthony and Chasen were leaving. I nodded my approval, acknowledging the responsibility they took to come to my classroom on their own without my having to find them. "Bye-bye Miss Bass," they said in unison.

"Goodbye," I returned, eying them suspiciously. I walked into my clean room and around to the back of my desk. I picked up my phone and noticed "new photos" stored in the camera.

"Huh," I said, puzzled, as I opened the files. I found myself staring at Chasen's grinning face as he was cranking dat souljaboy. I gasped and ran out the room. "Chasen!!!!!!!!!!!" I yelled down the empty hallway. "Chasen!!!!"

All I saw was a shirttail scoot around the corner.

Prudence

At the end of the day on Tuesday, I gave my first period class free time to work on their homework.

"Productive work!" I declared. "This is not kick back time. If you are going to talk quietly, it better be while you are taking care of your business."

Upon instruction, chatter filled the room as my kids began sliding their desks together into groups, pulling work out of their backpacks, groaning about how mean I am because I give more homework than any other teacher.

"Yeah, yeah," I said, amused. "Sit down and get to work."

I pulled out my book and started to read. DeShay, who sat in front of my desk, got up and grabbed my Word Teaser box. "Can I look through this, Miss Bass?" he asked.

I looked up at him. "DeShay, I know you have work to do," I said.

"But this is vocabulary building," he said. "I am trying to become more articulate."

I stared at him. "Fine," I said.

I went back to reading. Ten minutes later, I feel someone staring at me. I glanced up and DeShay is standing right next to me. I jumped.

"DeShay what are you doing!" I said, exasperated. "What do you need?"

DeShay shrugged.

"Then why are you standing next to me?!" I exclaimed.

DeShay handed me the Word Teaser card in his hand. It read:

PRUDENT

"Pronunciation: prOOd'-nt
Function: Adjective
Definition: Thoughtful or wise; careful in making decisions or taking action."

I flipped the card over.

"Go stand next to the most prudent person in the room," the directions read.

DeShay stared at me and pointed to the card. "I am just following the directions," he said.

"DeShay-" I began. I sighed. "Thank you very much but I need you to go sit down now and do your work."

He dragged his feet back to his seat.

Living With Cancer

There is nothing easy about following Jesus. Any person Jesus calls He calls to death, as He died - death to self. No believer ever completely dies though, because there is that thing residing in every human that fights submission in all forms. It is the right to life as we please and choose, the right, as the Addams' Family Remix goes, to:

Do what we wanna do
Say what we wanna say
Live how we wanna live
Play how we wanna play
Dance how we wanna dance
Kick and we slap a friend...

Admittedly, it is easier to talk about the arrogant lowlife you just can't stand behind her back and wallow in feelings of schadenfreude when she breaks out in a rash that makes her face blow-up, or loses her job or gets dumped by her lower-life boyfriend instead of compliment her for what's good about her; It's easier to push the "instantly to voicemail" button on your phone when that annoying, needy, talkative friend that insists on telling you every detail of his mundane existence calls to tell you about the variety of vegetables he purchased at the supermarket last week; It's easier to pretend you don't notice the dishes in the sink and let your roommate wash them...again; It's easier to tell your family that unfortunately there is absolutely no cake left and then gorge on the gigantic piece you hid for yourself in the back of the fridge when they all go to bed; It's easier to yell and scream and throw a tantrum when someone offends you than to patiently hear the opposing perspective; It's easier to give an incompetent driver the bird instead of a friendly wave; It's easier to give the homeless person on the corner the number to a Job Hotline than lunch; It's easier to read books about imaginary people rather than deal with real ones; It's easier to cut ties with an insensitive loser you mistook for a friend than fight for a worthwhile relationship; It's easier to say "shut the fuck up" to a culturally illiterate ignoramus who tells you that you are unusually smart for a black person rather than just smile and walk away; It's easier to pretend you didn't notice that the cashier didn't charge you for the Snickers you added to the conveyor belt last minute; It's easier to drive just fast enough so that that car that's had its blinker on for a quarter mile can't merge into your lane; It's easier to resent than to love; It's easier to step on weak someones in pursuit of your own happiness than help them in the direction of theirs; It's easier to be selfish than selfless; It's easier to give in to what we naturally are, however dysfunctional, than to conform to a higher standard.

I cannot help but wonder what makes me so inclined to be wicked...

Living as a follower of Jesus is to have help living. It's me understanding that I have many problems that have origins in a part of me that I can neither reach, nor fix. As I am, I am ruled by what I feel; what I feel, however, often distorts reality.

Thanks to sin, humanity as it involves desire, appetite and feeling is now like a cancer. There is nothing wrong with desire, appetite and feeling by themselves, because they make us human beings. Cancer cells, in like manner, are by themselves good, life-sustaining elements of our existence.

The problem is when good things malfunction.

Cells begin to proliferate out of character and out of control, against imperatives issued by the brain. They operate at a high level of dysfunction and then take over the human body, eventually killing the host. Likewise, Love becomes lust, self-love becomes hatred, pride becomes arrogance, anger becomes abuse, hunger becomes ravishing greed, pain becomes malice, etc. These things, left unchecked and unregulated, damage people, causing them to distort, corrupt and self-annihilate. And so, now, we live in a world with third world countries and urban ghettos, drought and famine, gun possession, slavery and starvation, war and bloodshed, extravagance and poverty and 10,000% profit, prostitution and exploitation, gluttony and incarceration, racism and genocide, drug overdoses and husbands beating their wives, failed marriages, broken homes and boys and girls living without fathers. This is the world cancer has created.

Jesus (represented in the presence of the Holy Spirit), therefore, is the treatment for the human cancer, sort of like an antidote that overrides abnormal cell proliferation. The Jesus vaccine does not completely eliminate the cancer cells, though, at least not in this lifetime. Instead, he gradually carries a person through a healing process that begins with regulation and moves towards wholeness.

So, believers in Jesus are nothing more than sinners just like everybody else, who have chosen to accept the free "vaccine" offered by God, a treatment powerful enough to control abnormal expressions of what He created to be good in the first place. The Holy Spirit living in each patient, guiding and convicting each patient, is disease regulation.

Thank Heavens! :)

The problem, though, is that most people don't know that they're sick...

Bloodline

"Jesus and Mary Magdalene were definitely in a sexual relationship. Then, you have the relationship between Jesus and John, the 'disciple whom he loved,' which would make Jesus also bisexual."

"Whoaaaaaaaa," Mimi exclaimed. "That's crazy! I never thought of that!"

Maritza, Mimi, and I had just left the Hollywood screening of the new documentary, "Bloodline." The director, Bruce Burgess, made a film detailing his search for the supposed secret being maintained by the Priory of Sion, the secret that Dan Brown brought forth in "The DaVinci Code," a secret originally put forth by the book, "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" in the '80s: Jesus and Mary Magdalene were lovers, she stole his body and staged his death, ran to France and had children whose descendants are now alive, well, and...French. The theory suggests that the past kings of France were of Jesus' bloodline, and now the Secret Society is hiding the locations of the bodies of Jesus and Mary Magdalene.

I sat in the back seat, listening to the conversation between Maritza and Mimi as they recapped the movie, humored, but feeling no compulsion to say anything.

* * *

A few days before we went to the movie, Vegas, Mimi, Derrick and I had a conversation about Jesus' humanity.

"I think Jesus had a wife and kids," Derrick said. "I just do. Jesus, after all, was a man, and he experienced everything everyone else experienced, including love I'm guessing. What's wrong if he did have a wife? It's not like it would change his message."

"Of course it would," I said.

"Why?" he said.

"Sex is a spiritual union," I said. "Jesus could not have had sex with a woman who was a sinner because in that unity, his sinless state would have been compromised through her sin."

"What if Jesus had a relationship with Mary Magdalene though," Mimi said. "That wouldn't shake your faith, would it Sarah? There would be no reason for you to stop believing."

"Of course there would be," I said. "Jesus having a wife and children would make him out to be the greatest liar and fraud every to walk the earth."

"But his message was still good, and one of hope."

"Not really," I said. "The message Jesus brought was hardly feel-good. It was radical, divisive, controversial, and perceived by the religious authorities of the time as antagonistic. Jesus made the greatest, most arrogant claim of any human being - he not only claimed to be the Son of God, but he claimed to be the only way for people to be saved. And, he claimed that he would conquer death. His message, either way, was insane. He was either insanely deceptive, which would make him a very bad person, or he was insanely correct."

"But what if Mary Magdalene did hide the body," Mimi said. "What if Jesus never died, but she tricked everyone into thinking he did."

"That's a hard one to sell," I said. "If you look at Jesus' disciples, they were skeptical of his message for the three years that they walked with him. And they spent all of their time with him. Nobody knew him better than they did. Peter was the classic idiot of the group, the best representation, in my opinion, of the average person. He never understood Jesus. He said stupid things, had a problem believing what Jesus said, claimed to be loyal and then ended up denying any association with Jesus when he was about to die...Peter was a weak, skeptical, flaky, cowardly individual. No one would bet on Peter to come through in a tight squeeze. He was the classic traitor.

"But the crazy thing about Peter," I said, "was that he suddenly went from being a coward to the champion of Jesus' message - literally, the rock on which Christ built his church. Peter transforms into this bold evangelist spreading the Gospel even at the threat of death. He completely changes after Jesus' resurrection, and continued Jesus' message until he himself was executed by crucifixion. And even when he was dying, he begged his executors to crucify him upside down because he said he was not worthy to die in the manner of his Lord.

"Now," I said. "What on earth would make Peter, the cowardly traitor, transform like that? 11 out of the 12 disciples ended up being martyred, and they all died proudly proclaiming the name of Jesus as Lord. There is no way Peter and the other disciples would have given their lives for a hoax. No possible way. Would I give my life for a hoax? Absolutely not. But, if Jesus did raise from the dead, that's worth anybody's life."

"Maybe Peter was an opportunist," Derrick said. "He wanted the fame that Jesus had. And he had the chance to assume leadership of Jesus' movement, even if Jesus did die."

"That doesn't make sense," I said. "Why would Peter want to be the leader of a movement that killed Jesus? He denied any association with Jesus when he was being killed. Unless Jesus did actually rise from the dead, Peter would have had no reason to put himself out there, because he would have then been the next target. Jesus didn't have celebrity popularity among the religious leaders. He was a threat. Peter would not have wanted that."

"I am still confused about why Jesus' having a wife and kids would make people stop believing," Mimi said.

"Because," I said. "The foundation of life is that Jesus came to save fallen man. He was 100 percent God and 100 percent man. He lived the perfect life, which made him the perfect sacrifice for all of humanity. His coming had been prophesied for thousands of years, and God himself declared Jesus to be his Son. If Jesus was a liar, then God is also a liar and deceiver which would mean he is not God, and so it is all one big lie."

"How would you feel about that, Buddy," Vegas asked me with a grin. "Are you hesitant to go see Bloodline? Are you afraid of what you might find out?"

"No," I said. "I want to go see it, actually. I want to see what's out there, and what's being talked about. Am I afraid that my faith would be challenged? No, I am not afraid of that. Like Peter, I spent the first 14 years of my life following rules of the Bible out of fear of Hell. God was some distant power I was afraid of. I was a good person, but not sold out for Jesus by any means. He hadn't yet shown himself to be a savior for me.

"But then, all of a sudden, he did. He performed such a mind-blowing miracle in my life, the resurrection became real for me, and my faith with it. So, with that said, I don't just know God in my head, following rules and trying to be a good religious person. I am not religious. I am a believer, and Jesus Christ is real to me, in my life, as surely as I am talking to you now. I have walked with a personal God for almost 10 years, and as I know him better and better, my faith grows in strength. I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that Jesus is who he said he is. So no, I am not worried about them finding Jesus' body. Or Jesus' French children, for that matter, which is a humorous speculation in itself. It's never going to happen because Jesus is not dead."

* * *

The movie turned out to be a journey about Bruce Burgess trying to connect circumstantial evidence using fallacious logic to make Jesus have a wife and kids in France. Burgess ended up in France, at the Rennes le Chateau, where he and a man living in a van discovered a body in a cave next to a chest that contained a cup, some sort of middle eastern vial, and a bottle traditionally used for perfumes. All in all, some scientists tried to carbon date the hair on the unidentifiable corpse, and although they were unable to tell from the sample the gender of the mummy, Burgess somehow concluded that the corpse was middle eastern and by some sort of rickety syllogism crafted by Burgess, Mary Magdalene. Burgess concluded his film by saying, "I think Jesus was married to Magdalene and had children..."

Burgess surprised the theater by entering at the end of the film to take questions, to the applause of the audience. He happened to be in Hollywood.

During the question and answer session, I was baffled by the extent to which people praised the man for finding the "truth." I knew that most of the people in the audience were secular, because most evangelical Christians would be offended by the making of the movie, let alone open-minded about seeing it. Audience members were asking questions such as, "how will the world take this - the fact that you have discovered Magdalene's body?" People were thanking him for exposing the greatest "lie" of all time, for finally challenging a ludicrous notion that Jesus was somehow divine, etc..

I didn't feel the need to leap up and defend the name of Jesus to the theater; I was with my friends, who are seekers, and I understood the context of the movie. But, nevertheless, as a reasonable human being, I was still startled by the readiness with which they accepted these random and loosely connected finds as "truth."

Burgess declared, "I am in search for the truth. The most important thing this movie does is challenges Jesus' divinity. In doing that, it makes him more like us, instead of someone we cannot relate too. And, as such, it highlights the divinity in each and every one of us." The response of the crowd was thunderous applause, even a standing ovation. He then went on to talk about how much flack he has received from the evangelical right for his movie (no surprise, I thought), how many people got up and walked out of the theater, how many death threats he has received, and so on.

It didn't help either that a woman in the audience became very combative with the director during the Q and A and was making all of these rude, aggressive statements that weren't even factually correct. She was probably a church-goer, which made it even more embarrassing.

If there is one word in the human lexicon that has had a timeless history of controversy, it's "truth." I am always amazed when discussions concerning truth surface, because as much as people declare that they desire to discover the "truth," expose the "truth," tell the "truth," acknowledge the "truth," when it is presented to them or if another possibility poses a challenge to their own, they do their best to avoid, tailor, deny and/or dismiss it as wrong or irrelevant. So it remains an elusive concept, and one that people, for all of their claims, find offensive. Truth is only desirable when it is convenient and affirming to personal, individual beliefs. When it challenges, convicts, and questions preexisting systems, though (as truth should), it can't possibly be true...

Truth, however, stands by itself as its own witness that eventually has its say, whatever it might be. Though facades masquerade as copycats, truth eventually comes to light because it is constant; a sword in stone.

* * *
"I think Mary and Jesus had a relationship," Maritza said to me after the movie.

"What convinced you of that?" I asked.

"It just makes more sense to me than the resurrection," she said. "How can I believe some guy claiming to be God's son was raised from the dead? It's just not believable."

"And what if he actually was the Son of God, as crazy as it sounds?" I said.

Maritza hesitated. "I don't know," she said, shrugging. "I guess that would change things."

Great Expectations Part Uno

Our circumstances answer to our expectations and the demand of our natures. --Henry David Thoreau

Hmm.

I sat on the picnic table listening carefully to the conversation being volleyed back and forth between my friends. The topic: expectations.

It all began with a facetious comment I made in response to a joke Kenneth cracked. "Yeah, well I have very little faith in the male species," I said to him after he said something stupid about the fickleness of women.

"I know!" he said, throwing a wadded gum wrapper at my head. "We all know, Sarah. You make that all too clear."

"Shut up." I pulled a mangled granola bar out of my backpack and stuffed half of it into my mouth. "Besides," I said with my mouth full, "you really can't blame me. I haven't exactly stumbled across men who have compelled me to trust them."

"But you have to give people a chance," he said with a smirk.

"Who said I haven't?" I said. "I have, actually, and it has turned out quite badly." I swallowed and stuffed the other granola half into my mouth.

"When was that?" Christina, who was sitting next to me, asked curiously.

"Well," I said slowly, "the only man I ever came remotely close to loving ended up leaving me emotionally effed up. I finally came to realize through a series of very unpleasant circumstances that the individual I loved was not the person he chose to be. The part of him that had somehow managed to evade the destruction of his youth and retain its humanity was truly amazing, don't get me wrong. I mean that small part of his character really was profound, and powerful enough in its little bit to have me falling for him. It is to his credit, though. Not many people in their entirety have the quality he demonstrated in a fraction of his being. His potential as a whole person, therefore, is all the more magnified.

"Unfortunately," I continued, "part of a human being isn't enough for anyone. There were also many other parts of him including those that were cold, nasty, defensive and insecure. He could be very mean when he wanted to be, which always came out of nowhere and hit me like a unexpected blow. I began to feel bad around him, more than I was happy. And I knew when he was trying to make me feel bad, and could never understand it. When I saw what was happening to myself, I had to get away from him." I shrugged. "He treated me more like an enemy than a friend anyway, so I know living without me in his life is a minimal loss to him. I can't say that I ended it with the most integrity, but that kind of reflected my own emotional damage I think. I deserved much, much better than what he gave me. It took me more than two years to mend what he took out of me. Only after I recovered was I able to go back and apologize to him for some of the things I said at the end of our friendship, or whatever you want to call what it was that we had."

"And how are things now?" Christina asked.

"I think we're cool," I said. "It's funny though, because after I apologized to him he wrote me to let me know that I had really hurt him and that despite having 'thrown me out' with every other pain-inflicting article in his life, so to speak, he could find it in himself to slowly let me back in." I smiled, splitting a blade of grass between my fingers. "And so he remains the same as he always was, even after these years - afflicted and unapologetic, inclined to resignation and acceptance. All he knows is his own pain, no one else's. It's what makes him the victim, and justifies his actions and reactions, however harsh they are to others. It's the very driving mechanism behind his self-preservation. That's something nobody can compete with."

"Dag," Kenneth said, shaking his head.

"I have had experiences like that," Christina said. "I have tried to reach out and mend old relationships only to re-realize why I had to leave those people to themselves in the first place."

"Yep, but I wish him well anyway," I said. "Experiences like that teach you about people, and I think there is something good in him yet. But to be honest, I think I just expected too much from him."

"Yeah, but that's no reason to keep everybody else out," Kenneth said. "Every man is not him."

"I know that," I said. "But I have to be guarded nonetheless. I have too much to lose by placing my trust in the wrong person."

"I think people in general need to adjust their expectations for others, even me with my own husband," said Christina, who has been married for more than a decade. "I just learned that you can never say never."

"But for some things, Ima have to be able to say 'never'," I said. "The uncertainty surrounding some things, such as, say, fidelity in marriage would drive me insane."

"I hear what you are saying," Christina said. "But I just never say never. I guess it's because I come from a line of strong, independent black women who were married to trifling men. I just learned at a young age that you have to expect the best but prepare for the worst."

"But you can live never knowing whether your husband will one day cheat on you?" I asked.

"Never say never," Christina said, shaking her head.

"But would you ever cheat?" I asked.

"Oh no," she said. "I take marriage too seriously."

"Is it really too much, then, to hold your husband to the same expectation you have set for yourself?"

"I don't know, I just don't think people are as simple as all that," she said. "Things change, circumstances change, people change."

"But you have a happy marriage?" I asked.

"Oh yes," Christina said.

"Huh," I said, puzzled.

"People do change though, that's true," Kenneth said. "For instance, I have cheated twice in my life."

I turned to him in surprise. "You've cheated?" I said, trying to keep my tone light.

"Yeah," he said. "It was like eight years ago though, and it was on the woman I was going to marry."

"Why did you cheat," I asked flatly.

"Because she was the first woman I had ever been intimate with, and after that I really wanted to know what others would be like. So there was this one girl who was sweating me, sweating me, sweating me, so eventually I just gave in."

"Hmm," I said. "And the second time?"

"It was later on, with the same girl."

"Did you ever tell your fiance?" I asked.

"Nope," he said.

"Don't you think that were therefore a bit hard on your fiance when you ended the relationship after she was unfaithful to you?" Kenneth had told us before that a few months prior to his marriage, his fiance left him for another man.

"No," he said. "I mean, I at first tried to work things out a few weeks after the fact, but then after that I was like, 'nope'."

"But you never told her about your affair."

"Nope."

"Would you have?"

"Don't know," he said with a shrug. "All I know is that that was a long time ago and that I'm different now. I know I wouldn't cheat on a woman I loved."

I studied him skeptically, keeping my lingering questions to myself. I wondered what made him go back and cheat the second time, why he would have done it in the first place if he cared about her, why he was so sure that he would never again be tempted to step out on a woman if he did it once before - excuse me, twice before...

"Could you ever stay with a man who cheated on you?" he asked me.

"No,"I said matter-of-factly. "I would hope to God that I could eventually forgive him, but unfortunately, if a man cheated on me, I would not be able to stay with him. That's one the one thing I would be unable to get over, from which I don't think I would be able to recover."

"But what if you cheated?" he asked me. "Would you expect your husband to forgive you?"

"To be honest, I don't imagine myself ever being able to cheat," I said. "I know myself that much. I am twenty-four and have never let a man kiss me, let alone have sex. This is kind of crazy for someone my age, and it seems to solicit pity, for some reason, from people who find this out and wonder if I have a problem or something. I don't care, though. My faithfulness to the man I will eventually marry begins now, even though I don't yet know who he is. My waiting is my loving him already. Therefore, I think that practice in fidelity now is going to help me remain faithful in marriage."

"Well I can't wait to see who this man is," Kenneth answered. "Apart from Jesus, I'm not sure that such a man on whom you have set your expectations even exists."

I shrugged. "It's not about perfection. It's about that thing. I'll know it it when I encounter it, but I can't explain it. I trust God, that's what I know. It's faith."

"We shall see," Kenneth said, patting me on the back.

"We both shall see," I said.

22.5

I stared at Melvin as he fiddled with different buttons and knobs on my AE-1. His hair was locked in a mass of long, thin dreds that hung past his waist like little snakes. The roots were gray, but the color gradually got darker and deeper as it wound down the length of each lock, ending a dark brown at the tips. His hair kept the record of his years and marked the passing of time, retaining in its strands the visual progression from youth to age.

"The digital age," he muttered, absently shaking his head as he examined the interior of the body. He took a bottle of anti-dust and sprayed it into the camera. "It's all this generation knows. That's why they call me up here when someone brings one of these old ones in. I am the only one in here that knows about the old-school manuals anymore."

He set the camera down and popped the battery out of its terminal. Replacing the battery, he reattached the lens the previous attendant had been unable to put back on the camera. "This lens had a bayonet ring base," he said. "the lens, therefore, is mounted by lining up the red dot of the body to the red dot of the bayonet ring, turning the ring clockwise and pressing it gently until it locks into position-"

he twisted the bayonet ring slowly until the the lens hooks clicked into the grooves on the body.

"-like so." Melvin held the camera up and took several test shots. The camera, which had previously been stalling and failing to take pictures when I pressed the button, now snapped strongly with each of Melvin's air snapshots.

"What was wrong with it?" I asked.

"Nothing," Melvin said. "The battery just needed to be replaced."

I sighed in relief. "Other than that, what condition is it in?"

"Apart from the interior foam needing to be replaced, it's in excellent condition," he said, flipping the camera around in his hands. "The camera looks as though it has been in storage for years. It has been used, but thankfully, not misused."

He handed the camera back to me. "This camera is the best model Canon ever made," he said. "Despite being older than you are, the AE-1 was the digital camera of its time."

"Yeah, well I was thinking about getting a digital too," I said. "Just because it allows me to immediately see the types of photos I'm taking. At least until I know what I am doing."

"Learn both," Melvin said. "You have to."

"Even though I am only twenty-four," I said, "the extent and complexity of modern technology makes me feel old. My kids have so many advanced forms of video games, media players and communication gadgets, I am lost half the time when they try to explain what they did with some thingy-thing to somebody else's thingy-thing. Personally, I think it would be great to start a photography class at my school, just to expose kids to the most traditional visual medium."

"Ah yes, 'ghetto' kids," Melvin said with a smile. "They are by far, the most creative visual artists I have come across in my life. I would love to get back into teaching photography to urban youth. The amazing quality of kids in the inner city is that they have a unique way of seeing the world and understanding who they are in that world. Those very kids who have a creative, innovative outlook, however, are the same kids that can become problems for everybody else."

"Well yes," I said. "My most behaviorally challenged students are among the smartest and most perceptive that I teach."

"Exactly," Melvin said. "The key is to help them channel that. It's important that black kids begin to understand the power of visual media, as its own power of influence and as it exists alongside the written word. The combined force of the two shapes nations, histories and societies. Kids today don't know how influential the visual media is on them. They just take images in and take them in and take them in without processing them or being aware of the subliminal effects."

"I know," I said. "I am a writer, and I agree that the combined forces of both mediums can be enlightening and restorative or deadly and destructive. I drive by billboards daily featuring advertisements for 'Grand Theft Auto IV' and witness the biggest challenge to my classroom."

"What many people don't know is that Hitler's power during World War II was not in the strength of the Nazis or the Luftwaffe," Melvin said. "The power was in the propaganda. The propaganda he circulated was more powerful than any manpower he could have mobilized. The media made the people believe what Nazi Germany wanted them to believe."

"As did the Black Codes, Jim Crow, minstrel shows, lynchings, old cartoons and buffoonery posters white American society circulated against blacks," I added. "Visual media shapes social consciousness. It's terrifying if that social consciousness is founded on a series of exaggerations and lies. It lends itself to a perception of reality that doesn't exist. In the case of America, that reality has white people, as a collective, believing themselves better than everyone else and black people, as a collective, believing that they are less than everyone else. It's entitlement versus disinheritance. With this in mind, if I can somehow find a way to get my kids to read and listen and watch actively instead of passively, then I can begin to show them how to de-construct systems of influence and, where necessary, re-envision and recreate them."

"Well," Melvin said, "Give me a call if you want to start a photo club at your school."

"Oh yay," I said. "Absolutely."

"And keep working with that camera," he said. "That's a sturdy little thing you have there."

* * *

When people ask me how I feel as a teacher, I picture myself standing on a hot shore near the ocean, holding a styrofoam cup. The cup is chewed around the brim and has holes punctured in the sides and on the bottom. With this raggedy cup, I busily transport water from the deep, blue endlessness to a huge silo-like structure far away in the distance. No matter how fast I run (and I run pretty fast), the water leaks out onto the sand and evaporates without a trace. By the time I reach the silo, my cup is empty save the three or four water molecules that accidentally got stuck in the cup's interior ridge. And so I run back, trying again and again, trying to run faster and faster. When that doesn't work, I try holding the cup more tightly, plugging two of the fifty holes with my pinky and thumb, somehow trying to compensate for the frailty of the cup that magnifies the impracticality of the task.

A year goes by and then another year goes by, and I grow wearier, and wearier. And when I finally pause to look at my work, I find myself staring at three teaspoons of water in the hollow, resounding silo. I look back on my trail and see no evidence of the thousands of gallons I lost on the way that have now disappeared. At one point, I had them - I carried each drop of water. And at one point each of those drops slipped through a hole, fell and vanished.

The feeling of incompetence is overwhelming.

I believe in the power of my classroom. I believe in it for the hour and a half that I see my kids every day. What I cannot fight, however, is the influence of 22.5 hours beyond my reach. The likelihood that the 1.5 hours with me will somehow outweigh the time that they are subject to the worlds they inhabit, many of them bad, is slim. It could happen, in some cases. In many cases, however, those external worlds are at odds with the world of my classroom. For my kids, that very contention goes as far as to trivialize the world I occupy.

If I think about this long enough I will go mad, so I try not to. Instead, I write.

A Lesson Before Dying

The past two years have been a challenge for me for a number of reasons. I have been tested in more ways than I could have possibly imagined, and more deeply than I thought myself capable of enduring. I am thankful for the ways in which God provided me with the small important things that bring me joy, such as a home a mile from the beach (which I desired more than anything) and a community of friends and common believers who have been my family here in L.A. God has his ways of showing himself present in difficult situations, mostly notably in the small prayers we pray sometimes without even knowing it. These small signs of God's presence have given me the strength to face darkness and uncertainty and change head-on rather than flee into hiding.

Nevertheless, this does not minimize the amount of sacrifice that following Jesus requires. I came out to California around the end of June, 2006, and I am leaving California around the end of June, 2008. For the past 731 days, I have had to live one day at a time, one sunrise to one sunset, one moment to the next. Anything else, even the thought of tomorrow, was more than I could bear. I have lived in an emotional and spiritual pressure cooker that has more than permanently affected me; it has completely reshaped who I am, in ways that I don't even think I can yet articulate. This does not mean that my experience has been negative; my experience has been difficult and painful, but as I see now, necessarily so.

I think the easiest prayer for me to pray would be a prayer for comfort and happiness. Nobody wants to hurt, hunger, need or wait. They seem to be weakening agents that amplify what's already wrong with us. For this reason, the decision to be a follower of Jesus is completely ludicrous if one does not believe that Jesus is who he said he was 2,000 years ago. It would be impossible if God wasn't real. No person in their right mind would choose to live in a framework of constant submission and sacrifice to a will greater than his or her own. It's completely counterintuitive. Choosing to walk with God is to choose to live a life full of life, but it is a fullness of life manifested in death (strange, strange concept). And not necessarily physical death (though it began as such with Jesus), but death to the natural human instincts that lend themselves to multi-level self-destruction.

Suffering is the agent of internal change. I don't know why this is. It certainly isn't fun. It's painful and it's sobering. I don't remember noting any verse in the Bible that talks about Jesus exuding bubbling happiness. If anything, nothing suggests that he was particularly happy to the end of his life (which was a horrifying end, I might add). He was focused, purposed, and ultimately pleased at completing the task set before him by God, his Father, but this feeling was not the temporal fuzzy (and often fleeting) feeling of happiness.

Does this mean that followers of Jesus live lives that completely suck? No, no. But our lives are guaranteed to be tried and tested. It's the only way we can become better people; someone bigger and better molding us and reshaping us and replacing the warped with what's real.

We sometimes wrongly assume that we are born perfect, when the reality is that every person is born with defects regardless of how perfect or imperfect his or her family structure seems to be. As Malcolm X said, "every experience is an ingredient in the make-up of a person." It does not matter who you are, though - there is bound to be an eggshell or something in that cake batter that's going to throw off the taste, make the cake collapse, cause it to burn, and so on. Those defects become insecurities, they are compounded by negative experiences, they are exacerbated by the defects of others. And so we all, in our own ways, live already broken. Money might hide it, status might hide it, fame might hide it, devotion might hide it, drinking, drugs and and sex might hide it. But they do not erase it. It's something we are reminded of constantly when we are by ourselves with no one around. That naked, damaged person is the hardest person to face by ourselves.

It's kind of funny that I say all of these things because many of the people who meet me assume that I have everything in my life together. They assume that I am always confident and self-assured, that I am so strong I don't need anyone else, that I have never struggled with the things other normal people struggle with - like hurting, hungering and needing.

Part of the reason I have been so misinterpreted is because I have spent my life creating an impenetrable membrane around myself and my weaknesses. At first, it was necessary for my survival in the suffocating community in which I grew up. Later, it just became comfortable. It also allowed me to control how people viewed me, which mattered more than anything else in the world. My race, gender, background, and economic status were all unstated points I had to prove, stereotypes I had to deconstruct, perceived weaknesses for which I had to overcompensate. It gave the illusion of being sharp and fierce and unconquerable. What it was, though, was the flawed me hiding within the thick callous of my own creation, hiding with the fear that people would think less of or altogether dislike the imperfect person who was, in essence, me.

The external me could not be hurt, the internal me could. External me needed no one, internal me feared loneliness. External me never failed at anything, internal me worried that failure was inevitable. External me was always certain and always right, internal me was often uncertain and often second-guessing herself. External me was much, much safer because she wasn't weak. Internal me wouldn't be able to recover from being hurt by somebody else.

The challenges to my reality began in college where I was confronted with circumstances that stormed my life and shook my foundation. Most of the experiences that hit me hardest were those that I had with people. Some of my closest and most meaningful relationships ended in abominable ways, and those people hurt or lost or distanced in the process are the sources of my greatest regret...which is ironic, because I actually thought for the longest while that taking two O'Connell classes would top my list...

Vagas and I were talking one day about the impact of experiences and whether or not regret is something that people should even take to heart. "Everything happens for a reason," he said, "and the people we become in the process of those circumstances we wouldn't have become without the experiences. Either way, a lesson had to be learned, because personal development would be impossible without it."

"True," I said, "but the loss is still regrettable. If you sever ties you had with someone, you might walk away having learned a lesson on how to be better next time, with the next person, but you still walk away from that person. If that person meant anything to you, you are going to feel the loss, because that person is irreplaceable. Lessons might be the same, but people are not."

This is a lesson I have learned a few times at the unfortunate cost of destruction. Only since I have had the parts of my veneer gently stripped away through failure, uncertainty, loneliness, and acknowledged weakness I have come to realize this. I know now that I was not the best Sarah in the past that I could be to other people because I didn't know who that person was, behind that little curtain.

But then...

I walked into the classroom a perfectionist, with an Amherst degree English and Black Studies, only to discover that I didn't know how to teach. So the little curtain was flung back and my glass house shattered. From there I had to fish a different identity out from the shards, then get up and come to my classroom the next day, and the next day and the next day, failing, and failing, and failing again until one day, I didn't care anymore about how it made me look. Then, I stopped failing.

I moved to a different state needing no one and found myself struck with such an aching loneliness, I had to reach out to others for the sake of my own survival. I had to make and maintain friendships with people and learn to articulate how much I needed them - not just desired them, but needed them in my life because having them in my life made me a better person.

I came to California thinking that certainly the next five years of my life would play out like the movie I created in my head. I leave California in a few weeks without a clue as to where I will be a few months from now and feeling quite uncertain, yet absolutely certain that the way of uncertainty is the way to go next.

Finally, I came here as a person without any visible flaws and I leave noticeably flawed. I leave now at a place where I am finally getting over myself and the embarrassing reality that I am, in fact, human. Frustrated by my own limitations still, I am yet willing to be different, to have my mind changed, to be wrong (and admit it) and to consider the position of others, not as a person on the other side of a divide, but as one person to another on the same side. I am a more visibly imperfect me, but a better me nonetheless.

I still struggle with the insecurities that lead to the erection of my glass house, especially when a situation gets uncomfortable and my impulse is to retreat into what I know is safe. They are insecurities that God has begun to heal, but whose scars yet remain. I imagine that I will always struggle with those natural inclinations, because they are the foundation of my humanity. But, as Jesus demonstrated by example, the suffering we experience by dying each day to our natural inclinations for the sake of who God intended us to be is resurrection. And life.