I am a crowd scanner, a people watcher, and he was hard to miss. Half the size of anyone near him, disengaged, sad.
Except I knew him.
And I'd been through these assumptions before.
One of the advantages of having taught 5th grade for the last three years is that I know students in this room. We've spent time together.
And this sad, withdrawn student saved me. Always looking to stretch 5th grade small group time to new places, I had made puzzles out of some artwork on the seven days of creation. Pixelized watercolor portraits that spoke to my sense of artistry. I cut them into tetris size pieces, never dreaming how hard the puzzles would be to put back together. They were almost impossible. One of those times when a craft turns out 1,000 times harder than what you thought it would be. It would have been a disaster, a complete waste of card stock and ink.
Except for this young man. I watched. He was methodical and organized. Far more than I would have been. Pieces got organized by color then shape and systematically tried and moved to different piles. It was slow, but effective. It took weeks of the free minutes at the end of class when I let kids choose what to do, but in addition to the organization there was a quiet sense of persistence.
One by one the days of creation took form on the classroom bulletin board.
Different thinkers. They are the ones more comfortable with puzzles than people. Their responses may not be the same as their peers. They may seem isolated, unresponsive.
We make assumptions because they don't interact with the other students in the room, that they are friendless. Or we assume that because there aren't smiles, that they are sad. We take quietness and label it as disengaged.
And sometimes we are so far from the truth. Because there were friends, and he wasn't sad, but content in his surroundings, supported by a loving family. As to disengaged, well, I came to find out that this little 5th grader was thinking thoughts so deep that it would challenge the thinking of the adults surrounding him.
It took time. Time to learn. Time to tear down the preconceived notions that hit me initially.
And here I sat watching - a year later, and if I hadn't known already, I would have made the same exact assumptions.
And I wondered. In my case, maybe God wasn't focusing in on my reticence to give away earthly possessions, but my reticence to delay judgement. A tendency I have to hoard my good opinion until I feel it is earned. What if I gave grace more freely? What if, when slighted either intentionally or obliviously, I forgave 70x70 times. What if I focused on finding the positives and giving people my best impression of them from an outside view instead of pouncing on percieved negatives.
One of the things I am in constant wonder over is God's ability to hit me where I am - even though I am 3-4 times the age of most in this room. Even though I am still on my very first cell phone.
The kids were dismissed and I was pondering stuff. The stuff that is on the inside that I don't necessarily want to fess up to - the dirty basement that you close up when company comes. And in pondering I almost missed it. But I didn't.
He walked by on the way to group and caught my eye,
and he waved,
and he smiled.
And that smile.
My heart melted.
Because that smile meant 100 of the ones that come so readily to others.
Thank you God for my different thinkers,
and what they teach me every day.
