Devotional 12-17-12

For Olivia

In 1975 I was hired to teach sixth grade in an elementary school in a small West Virginia town. I had just finished my first year of teaching, if you could call it that, and was desperate to find out if the problem was with the students – or me. Of course I already knew the answer, but I had to make one more go of it. How could I tell my parents that their college graduate was not cut out to be a teacher? Fortunately it was that year that I met Olivia Oldster (not her real name).

Olivia had begun teaching in the ‘30s and constantly demonstrated to her colleagues that we were not doing enough. When I complained that the furnace in my room was not working, she would remind me that she had taught in a one-room school where she and her students had huddled around a potbellied stove, fueled with logs she had cut prior to their arrival. When I mentioned it took me over an hour to get home each evening, she would reminisce about her days in the mountains and the times when neither she nor her students could get home due to a blocked road or bad weather. She had done it all, and I felt young and inexperienced. Maybe that was because I was young and inexperienced.

During the next four years, I became a better teacher due to Olivia’s influence. Like Mark Twain’s father, Olivia got smarter as I got older. Subsequently I was asked to join the staff of a new middle school and left the elementary school for another area. I never saw Olivia again, but I never forgot her words of wisdom.

Thirty-seven years have passed. It may sound strange, but I can hear her voice coming out of my mouth when I begin to recall where I was when John Kennedy was assassinated, Richard Nixon resigned, disco was cool, the Berlin Wall fell, the Gulf War ended, the Challenger exploded, and the New York Trade Center was attacked. I can hear her when I explain to younger teachers that education is not about getting rid of the old ways, but retrieving whatever is worthy, adding it to the new, and applying it to one’s life to make it better.

The following is a work that I feel sums up Olivia’s philosophy of life. And while I cannot speak for our Lord and Savior, I think He would approve. Read it slowly. Read it more than once. Read it until in your heart you have rung out the unworthy and rung in the love of Jesus Christ.


Christmas and the New Year Bells

Alfred Tennyson

The time draws near the birth of Christ;
The moon is hid; the night is still;
The Christmas bells from hill to hill
Answer each other in the mist.

Four voices of four hamlets round,
From far and near, on mead and moor,
Swell out and fail, as if a door
Were shut between me and the sound:


Each voice four changes on the wind,
That now dilate, and now decrease,
Peace and goodwill, goodwill and peace,
Peace and goodwill, to all mankind.

This year I slept and woke with pain,
I almost wish’d no more to wake,
And that my hold on life would break
Before I heard those bells again:

But they the troubled spirit rule,
For they controll’d me when a boy;
They bring me sorrow touch’d with joy,
The merry, merry bells of Yule.

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind,
For those that here we see no more;
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,
And ancient forms of party strife;
Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners,purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
The faithless coldness of the times;
Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes,
But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease,
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old
Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.

Amen

Becky Warren