West Cocoa Chat

Working as a Christian teacher (sorry Randy) in a public school setting can make for some interesting situations. At our school each teacher has nine weeks of “morning duty” and nine weeks of “afternoon duty.” Each teacher is given a post to supervise students and to direct them to certain areas of the building while denying them access to others in the mornings and afternoons.

My job (“should I choose to accept it”) is to prevent students from going into the 400 wing classrooms in the morning unless they have a valid (like “My Mom wanted you to have this $50 gift card to the Outback Restaurant because you are one of the top 5 teachers in the entire civilized world.”) reason. This morning 2 students came up to me at my post and asked for permission to pass. When I asked them for their “valid” reason, they said, “We’re going to the “Christ on Campus Club meeting.” I told them they had selected wisely and gave them permission to pass. As the 2 young men walked past me one of them said proudly, “Yeah, we’re Christians!”

For all of the flack Public Schools sometimes take I just wanted you to know that there are some rays of His light in our facilities. Speaking of rays of light let me relay another incident that took place at one of our local High Schools and was relayed to me by one of the teens (Daniel) in our youth group.

Daniel told me that a student in his class sneezed and several people responded with, “God bless you.” He said his teacher immediately made an announcement saying, “You are not allowed to say “God bless you” when someone sneezes in here.” When asked why she stated that someone might not be a believer in God and thus would be offended.

Daniel said almost on cue several students said, “I’m not offended by God. God bless you.” He said several others said, “I’m a Christian and I believe in God.” He said the rest of the class was taken up with people sneezing and multiple people saying, “God bless you.”

Isn’t it great to know that we have young people practicing the words of Paul in Romans 1:16:

“For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.”