I am an assistant principal in a middle school (grades 6-8). When I have to search a student's cell phone, I often get sick to my stomach at what I find. It gets worse and worse every year.
"I could feel hot, salty tears coming down my face. I sat and cried silently... I was scrunching myself up against the wall as far as I could. All of a sudden, someone from behind us taps on the guy’s shoulder..."
"The smell of stale cigarette smoke mixed with urine and body odor permeated from his dirty, wrinkled clothing. He’d been known to pass out at the hospital room bedside, after vomiting all over the floor."
"I don't want anyone to ever tell me there's not a God. There is a God, and he works in the most amazing way, and he's touched me today out of the blue. And I'm not even a real religious person."
"'I’m a homebody,' my son declared with confidence and surety. I blinked. First of all, where did he (then four) hear that expression? And second, how did I not know this?"
"You never figure out, until it’s too late...Yet I tried. For 10 years, in fact... I took a rocket ship billions of light years away from who God made me to be. No wonder my existence felt alien."
I told her that God would walk us through the current crisis. She stood up, threw a Kleenex box at me and yelled as she walked out of the room, “Stop talking! Just stop! I don’t want anything to do with your God.”
"Recently, my family walked past a Victoria’s Secret store (which was across from the kids’ playground). I was behind everyone, helping our youngest child keep up, and couldn’t help but notice how the older kids’ eyes were instinctively drawn to look at the pictures of nearly nude women hanging in the window."
