Blah Blah

At the risk of being placed on Karl's "Blogs on Life Support" list and having Cory stop reading my blog altogether, I decided to write a quick note. I am sorry to all of my blog fans out there for neglecting my blog but things have been hectic lately. I am so close to the end of it all, I have 7 instructional days left in my student teaching and 10 days until Pascha! Bright Monday will be extra bright this year, not only will my belly be full of Mac and Cheese, ice cream, and chocolate milk, but I will have my Masters degree!

Things have going fairly well this week in the classroom. I don't know how many of you reading this had a chance to go to the Marriage Retreat a few weeks ago at St. Johns but it was really great. I had absolutely no intention of going at first, I had the attitude of "Why should I go? I am not married! Plus I already know that once I find the right guy we are going to be so in love that we will ,as Tiffany put it, "prance off into the sunset and our life will be perfect and happy, full of sunshine and lots of dancing in fields of daisies..." Was I in for a rude awakening! After the first night I was left thinking, "Wow, marriage is HARD! Is there anything good about marriage?" I knew that of course there are lots of wonderful things about marriage but the first night wasn't about that, I had to wait until the next day to find out...

What I really took away from the retreat was a better understanding of what it means when married people say that you "work out your salvation together." This phrase really didn't hold much meaning to me before because I had no concept of how spouses challenge one another to grow in their love both for God and each other every day. After hearing the Dr. Philip and everyone share I feel that I have just a glimpse of what this means on a day to day basis, how every interaction with your spouse requires making a choice whether or not you are going to respond with love.

This was all great to have my eyes open to but I feel like I have to kind of file this information away to use for future reference. The part of the talk that really spoke to me and has changed my day to day interactions were what Philip referred to as "bids for communication" which are "small exchanges that happen between couples throughout the day that are requests for intimacy." They are, "ways in which we manifest our love for one another." Examples of these are, sharing a funny or interesting story about your day or telling them that you saw or heard something that reminded you of them, all of which tell the person "Hey, I care about you and what you have to say." Philip says that the way in which we respond to these bid sends a clear message to the other person how you feel about them. We can either choose to turn towards, away from, or against the other person by our words, actions, or body language. These bids of communication are by no means limited to communication between couples but can be easily applied to every kind of relationship with people.

The talk about bids of communication really made me think about the ways in which I respond throughout the day to my students. Did you know that the average teacher is asked over 2,000 questions a day? I read that somewhere and I believe it from experience! Kid really like to share the most random and pointless tidbits of information which constantly make me think to myself, "Why in the world would I care about this?" and "Why is he or she telling me this?" but what I realize is that each of these interactions is a bid for communication, they just want to talk to me, and to have my attention for that split second or minute. It is so tempting to just be like "Okay, can you have a seat we are about to start," or even worse "Why are you up here you should be doing this..." So lately I have started to take the time to listen attentively to these random comments and questions and try my best to always no matter what respond with as much enthusiasm I can muster for that split second. Now I can't say that I have noticed any immediate difference from my kids but I feel good about having my eyes opened to the way that I can use my kid's comments and questions as constant challenges from God to respond to His children with love, patience, and kindness.

Now I know that this post was a bit random and a bit pointless, but just think of it as my bid of communication to you, how will you choose to respond??? (o: