Idols

When I was sixteen, I lived in France. I loved it there: the freedom the Metro and bus lines gave me, the art, the numerous parks, and little shops with amazing hot chocolate. I was a teenager so school wasn't my favorite thing of all time, but it was an incredibly good school. Even the buses they transported us in were first class. I got to go on some of the best field trips, simply because I went to a school in Paris. I loved it. 

 The field trips and nice busses were great and all, but my favorite part was the learning. It was there, I remember having a teacher sit down with me and basically telling me I was smart, just simply in a unique way. I drank that up like a thirsty animal. The irony was, I received worse grades there than I ever did in any other school. Sweeping aside the normal math and science classes, the classes pulled out my gifts, made me use my brain and find I had one. It was wonderful. And it was no wonder that I started to idolize a few teachers. A lot of teenagers have crushes on their teachers. That wasn't it. I didn't have any feelings for them, but I lapped up everything they said, spun those things in my mind and learned. 

 My time in Paris, was also the first time I started sharing my faith. Like most teenagers in almost anything, I was clumsy about it, almost brutish. God has taught me so much since, and I look back and laugh at my own weird antics of the time. I can only pray that nobody suffered negatively from it.

I'm not someone who tends to share my faith on the streets. I will probably never be a soap box preacher. Other than that one fumbling time in a classroom, I plan on never telling people they are going to hell. To me, when I tell people about Christ, even then when I did it so often, it is like I am baring my soul. It is an incredibly intimate thing for me mentally, because He means that much to me. So, when I say I felt a connection with those teachers and fellow students who I talked to about such a thing, as a naïve sixteen year old, please understand it wasn't creepy but yes pretty intimate for me.

There was this one teacher at the school who I both idolized and shared God to. God never leaves any item un-dusted. He uses everything in our lives. Whether he at first wanted me to feel any connection to anyone at the school or not, he did use this one connection to have me pray for him over the years.

Later I found out something about him that wasn't so great. It took me by surprise. He'd done something that I just couldn't tolerate myself. Me, Heather, couldn't take in easily and say, “That's all right.” But God continued to have me pray for him and so I did. Still later I read a book by him, that seemed to mirror strangely the actions I'd heard of before.

This teacher taught me to read between the lines and I did. Whether it was what I wanted to read or it was real, I don't know. To some, his novel was just lewd and well written. To me it spoke volumes into the heart of the writer, and humans in general.

So often everything seems fine on the outside. The person can have amazing philosophies, make the mind snap to attention. Then you look deeper, and what is there is a lost soul grasping for hope, for a little bit of light. Grasping to feel something and to hold onto it. We can understand everything in the world and have nothing, but an empty pit.

Because we may be an incredibly articulate person, we may have everything in the universe, but without the utter wonder of God's grace and forgiveness, we are nothing, and while we may not know this, our souls do.

It took a while, and I will never idolize this person again, but I can find forgiveness in my heart because first, I was forgiven, and God has and will always love and forgive him as well as you.

Heather