Many years ago a cousin of my father’s undertook to trace the lineage of our family, to find, as far as possible, the beginnings of our family tree. Yesterday, when researching material for one of my blog posts, I was reminded of that effort when writing about the family’s Scottish heritage.
It seems that we are descended from William the Conqueror, and from one of his daughters who married into the royal line in Scotland, from Robert the Bruce and other kings and queens of Scotland. I have a scarf and Jane has a Tam with the Royal House of Stuart’s tartan, a very colorful pattern which identifies where we belong. Probably not much is made of this today, even in Scotland, but they are beautiful pieces to wear.
The tartan is made of up of very bright Scottish wool threads, reds, greens, golds, and other hues presenting a burst of color not quite like any other tartan created for clans, quite distinct. Taken together anything of Royal Stuart is quite pleasing to wear, a nice accent for sartorial pleasure.
But this is also a metaphor of our lives. When we get to my age, there is a tendency to look back over our accomplishments in almost 8 decades of living and try to figure out if we had any impact on the people we knew during our working careers. Yet we really do not know how we affected others.
Of course we look at our children and grandchildren and see our influence on their lives, but much of our everyday living has been with others, and working with those not related to us. Have we made a difference in the lives of others?
Solomon wrote in Ecclesiastes 11:1, “Cast your bread upon the waters, for you will find it after many days”. “What you sow, you shall also reap” was the dictum of Paul in Romans.
What has this to do with life’s tapestries? On Wednesday, I was preparing to have a minor medical procedure to help my healing from an illness. I heard my name called, and a lady, probably in her forties, then told me “8th grade history, Crestwood School”.
Since I had retired from Crestwood teaching in 2005, somehow I was remembered as part of her past.
A couple of years ago, friends of ours and we were waiting for a table at Outback when the woman in line in front of us turned and exclaimed, “Miss Anderson!” and she and Jane recounted the time when Jane taught at Terre Haute North High School and this lady was a student of hers — forty years ago!
Another woman was checking Jane out at the Bible bookstore in Terre Haute when she suddenly said, “Aren’t you Miss Anderson? I had you for sophomore English at Garfield High School!” That was Jane’s first year of teaching when she was barely 22, and they laughed together about the antics of some of the boys in that class.
And some years earlier, as Jane was heading down to the basement of the church she attended in Terre Haute, she passed a young gentleman entering with some friends. He called her by name, reminded her he had been in some of her French classes in high school, and told her how impressed he and his classmates had been because she was a young, single teacher with a “cool” car (a new silver Monte Carlo with black vinyl roof) and yet was not shy about letting them know that she was a Christian.
As for me, one of the freshmen English teachers at Paris High School always had her incoming students write an essay about their favorite teacher in junior high. Among the students from Crestwood where I had taught, most named me as the teacher they remembered fondly and were impressed by, although I didn’t find this out until after Jane and I were married and the other teacher recounted this to her.
Jane taught 44 years and I taught 38 years, and neither of us went into the profession to be “remembered” fondly after decades of work. But in these instances, part of their lives were so affected by our work they did recall. And they are not alone. Countless former students or parents of former students say “hi” to us, calling us by name in Walmart or elsewhere. And though most of them had us more recently than forty years ago, most of them have not been in a classroom for years.
These instances are not recounted for anyone to praise us for being “paragons of virtue”, but to illustrate that there are people who do respond to being treated with Christian compassion and attitudes. Anyone can do this for the next generation!
Christians do leave footprints in people’s lives. Part of the mosaic, of the tapestries of life they have are our footprints, our pieces of the mosaics they see, our strings of the tapestries of what they have become.
Our efforts to exhibit Christian qualities of fairness, Christian character, gentleness of spirit never go unrequited. In all my years of teaching, never once was I rewarded with a “Teacher of the Year” plaque, not was I singled out for some signal achievement during my tenure in the schools. Others did, and that was fine with me, for when someone shows that my presence in their lives was positive, after two decades, forty years, or however many have transpired, those instances mean more than any trophy given while teaching.
Going back to the colorful scarf of our clan — live the Christian life we should, and someone hence will look back over the tapestry of their lives and see a thread that we put there because we cared enough to do so, be they neighbor, friend, family member or, in our case, students. You may never know how you affect others, but you do.