They say dreams are small pieces of your subconscious finding the spotlight where your conscious currently resides.
I’m not sure who they are and I’m not sure if anyone’s ever said
that because I’ve never heard that before.
…but, c’mon, it sounds scientific and exactly what dreams do.
If you rewind
the tape, you would notice I wasn’t your average college kid who couldn’t wait until
those four dreadful years were over and I could live out the ambitions I went
into college debt for. To me, graduation was the equivalent of being thrown
into a world of unpredictable twists and turns, not an opportunity to turn your
future aspirations into now. After all, not everyone gets to be what they want
after the first try, and that scared me sleepless.
A majority of college graduates have to go through the painful years of discovering themselves before they wind up getting the career they went to college for – if their mind doesn’t change by the time the actual opportunity rolls around. So, their 20s are filled with either one, constantly competing against hundreds, if not thousands, of other applicants who are likely better qualified due to experience or bias. Two, they give up on what gets them giddy and resort to less pleasant experiences coming out of college in hopes it is merely a short-term rung of the ladder to the career of your choice. Or three, they step into something entirely different than what they were anticipating for the long-term and find out quickly enough that they are inspired to call an audible on their initial dreams.
For someone who already questioned whether they wanted to spend their money learning how to teach children, entering the field trying to prove myself to employers added to the pressure to be a booming success out of the gate. I was option one, but I wasn’t thrilled about it for many other reasons other than having to compete with other ambitious educators. Needless to say, I put more on my plate mentally than I should have – most of the pressure was unnecessary considering where I am at now.
I allowed this mindset to eat at me and cause me to randomly burst into tears throughout the final two years before my student teaching semester began. I was stricken by immense anxiety and stunned with indescribable doubt because I didn’t know what the future would have in store for me. So many times I prayed and asked God for a crystal ball to ease my mind. Instead of welcoming the mystery and anticipating the thrill that comes with the rollercoaster the real-world would put me on, I was apprehensive and shell-shocked that the rest of my life was within reach. You could argue I was allowing worry and anxiety to derail me from putting my future in God’s hands.
My two remaining years of college were when the subconscious in my
mind was making its way to the surface like a buoy refusing to go underwater. I
didn’t want to feel this terrible about the rest of my life after my college
education concluded, but like stuffing a million marbles behind a flimsy closet
door, the subconscious fear and crippling despair were bursting out of the
forefront of my mind – so much for the that part of my mind preventing me from
living my life peacefully and with eager anticipation to start the next chapter
of my life.
After college in Michigan, I moved down to Tempe, Arizona with a
college friend. The year my best friend and I moved south, I had a tremendously
difficult rookie year teaching 6th grade (not just because it was my
first). Put it this way: Most of my conversations with God sounded like, “I
told you this would happen,” as if I planned against God’s wishes to have
emotional and mental meltdowns in college just to have my feelings validated a
year later. No matter how I write about this season of my life, it sounds
bizarre to consider my logic at the time, or lack thereof. Turns out, the
nightmare year I experienced was necessary for the rest of my teaching career
to take shape. I needed to experience the pain in the forest to see the
clearing on the other side.
Without retelling the following decade and a half (known as the
clearing after the forest of pain and suffering) after college in too much
detail, the following school years teaching 5th grade in Gilbert,
Arizona were not only filled with some incredibly blessed professional years,
but also full of memories where God proved to me that he can use anyone he
chooses to do his will, even if it’s not always easy or rewarding.
However, the panic and unending barrage of discouragement I felt
in my remaining two years of college never disappeared; they just slowly
crawled back into the darkness of my subconscious where dreams and nightmares
are created when my head hits the pillow and my eyes drift off to sleep.
For example, I once dreamt I was back in Michigan. I was scheduled
to substitute for a Junior High class, but the dream started with me walking
into the school with my pajamas on. From the jump, I was unprepared to sub. As
is typical in my teaching dreams, I couldn’t find the room I was subbing for,
so when I finally did find it, I was already 15 minutes late. It was for 8th
grade science, and the kids started laughing the moment they laid their
judgmental eyes on me. I looked around the room and realized I was in a classroom
surrounded by glass windows twice the size of the regular rooms, and
surrounding the classroom were the hallways of the school like a moat
surrounding Alcatraz. When I finally meandered to the teacher desk, there were
no sub plans to be seen. Only the teacher’s science textbook teacher’s manual
was visible, and it was flipped open to a random chapter. As I scanned the
room, it was obvious I was flustered and unsure of how to help the kids for
that hour, let alone the entire 7 hours. This embarrassment, though not my
fault, became fuel for the fire as their laughter and apathy became louder. The
worst part was feeling like I was to blame for this mistake.
It was no dream. It was a nightmare. Unprepared, unworthy, underachieving,
and a waste of time: my worst fear in a realistic dream. That is what my
subconscious told me in those two years before graduation, and that is what
every dream about teaching has been about. This example is just one of many.
The many that tell me...
I’m not good enough.
They’ll never accept me.
I’m too stupid.
They’ll laugh at me.
I’ll humiliate myself.
I will ruin my one shot at this.
I’ll never make them proud.
I might as well give up while I’m ahead.
I’m a waste of time
No one should have taken a chance on me
I’m a failure and that’s all I’ll ever be.
But, for every nightmare I occasionally have about a school
experience that isn’t even real, I am reminded 25 times a day that God’s
grace is often revealed when reality doesn’t match the fictional horror stories
we make up in our minds.
God’s grace, when we choose faith in the midst of fear, proves it
is sufficient for you and me because God often reminds us that those lies will
remain lies as long as we walk with God to follow through on his plan for us.
It sounds like a mouthful, so let me paint you a clearer picture:
- Never have I ever subbed for a classroom where there were no lesson plans.
- Never have I ever had a classroom full of students laugh at my expense because I did something embarrassing.
- Never have I ever been humiliated because I wasn’t prepared to teach.
- Never have I ever gotten lost in a school because I couldn’t find where I was teaching for the day.
- Never have I ever been fired or in trouble because I wasn’t good enough to work at a school
Yet all of my teaching dreams have one
or more of these elements in them, which proves to me what God does through
you is powerful enough to transcend the lies we believe about ourselves.
Which makes these nightmares, as
realistic as they are at times, as silly as the unrealistic dreams where I turn
into a marshmallow in the middle of a blizzard. Those nightmares don’t align with
who I really am and what I’m really about.
For me, what my junior and senior year
of college brought to the surface was the lie I believed that I won’t amount to
anything because I won’t be good enough and no one will recognize me as worthy
of their time, thus rendering me useless and unserviceable.
That I will be a failure.
And, if God shows me through my career
that those are boldface lies, the dreams will remind me that, at any moment,
you could lose it all because all of the success you have had is smoke-and-mirrors
for what is true: you are not a true teacher because you are a failure.
Again, a lie, just like those
nightmares.
Starting to sound like a never-ending
abyss of bad news, isn’t it? Well, this is where the good news comes in like
that Gandalf scene in Lord of
the Rings: The Two Towers. Indeed, Gimli, the sun is rising: Rising
with good news.
Growing up, my dad called Satan a lion
without teeth. He can roar all he wants to scare the courage out of you, but he
can’t eat you unless you let him have his teeth. These dreams? They don’t have
teeth when I am steeped in the truth of who God says I am. The anxiety I felt
about the future in those remaining two years of college also didn’t have teeth.
The more I grounded myself in God’s Truth
and let His beautiful words fill my brain, the less the lies had a hold on me.
It’s like when you introduce a pan of burnt cookies to Dawn dish soap: the
longer the lies are marinating with God’s truth, the weaker of a hold those
lies have on you. When the lies are covered in Truth, you don’t even need to
scrape the burnt cookie crumbs off because gravity will do the job.
When you’re head is foggy and filled with doubt like mine was – when your nightmares are reality and feel so much like the Truth, it’s hard to see God’s intervention through it – don’t give up. Remind yourself and even memorize these Scriptures, because they are the Truth and no nightmare you’re living can change them to fiction:
“Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?” – Matthew 6:26
In my remaining years of college
before graduation, these were my main Bible verses that played leading roles in
my life at the time, and they helped me graduate higher than a 3.6 GPA, move
down to Arizona from Michigan, and start my teaching career teaching elementary
age kids. Over 15 years later, I am still teaching in Arizona because of God’s
goodness, faithfulness, and his peace guiding me through every up and down I
experience. These verses were the swords I used to fight against the lion without teeth. The Word of the Lord gave me the prosperity I needed, and his peace and provision reminded me of my worth in Him.
Praise God for his unfailing love and plan for me.