On the Field.

A scene in Facing the Giants cuts to the core of where I am at. Telling the story in a more vivid way than I am able. By using words and pictures and film to create the emotional sense of being that I enter.

The scene compels something so deep: Coach Grant is pouring and yelling and pushing and pressing and willing one of his players to go on, to give his best. The scene enters when Grant lines the team at one end of the football field. Brady, a player, is among them. Coach Grant presses him and says he thinks Brady can give more. Can do more. Can be more. So he pushes him and challenges him to it. To crawl hands and feet, carrying the weight of a friend on his back, and blind-folded mark his way across the field. He prods him to the fifty yard line but doesn't give way until the finish. Through Brady's pleading and hurting and burning and pain, Grant yells and screams and pushes and urges and eventually crawls on the floor next to Brady screaming, "You can do it! Don't give up on me now, Brady! " (I have to review this scene to give it all specifically)... Until Brady flops in a sweating, heaving heap at the finish line, the end of the football field. The other players stand in reverent silence and the camera pauses. And I sit and glean from the scene, filled with awe and pride and consumed with the context and content of the overture.

Putting everything on the field. Leaving it all there until there is nothing left to give.

This is how I feel. This is what I've done. I've put everything on the field.

These past years, teaching have felt like this. Like laying it all on the field. Giving and pushing and pressing, and giving more, more, more... Until all I have left is the heaving, empty, burning, gut-level endurance inside. It has taken more than I have to give, more strength that I was able to give up. It depleted me from my resources, my energy, my love, my passion. But I have done it, laid it all on the field. I gave everything, I gave my best. I pushed each bit of creativity, I marked every corner of effort, I challenged every stance I could until I left knowing I did everything I could to the best that I could. I loved, I learned, I created, I sat, I stirred. I told stories, I animated characters, I fostered community, I entered emotions, I assessed strategies, I designed activities. I sat with the child who needed a hand; I hugged the struggling ones in the room; I labored with those who needed the effort. In the intensity of the emotions, the call, the demands, the challenges, I gave.

I laid it all out there. Stripped myself of it. And let it go. Everything I have is on that playing field, that classroom and those hearts of the students who entered it. It is painted among the walls of the schools and the stories that are told there. I am exasperated in the quest of knowing it. But I also know as I go, I have done and given my best, more than my best. I laid everything, all it, more than I had to give, on the field.