Perfection

The Lord loves me and my life is perfect! I'm not saying that there aren't thing I would like to change. I would love, for example to get married sometime (in fact, at the moment, I would be happy with a date), and I wouldn't mind a job that was simply 40 hours a week and didn't give me work to bring home every night and on weekends! I could focus on the things I would like to change, but what's the point? It will just leave me feeling unsatisfied and thinking about how "I'll be happy when..." Instead, I've been thinking a lot about the blessings I already have, and I'm pretty sure my life is "practically perfect in every way"!

I've had an interesting week! My students have been crazy. I had one student perform a little "experiment" when we were doing a lab and blew something up (fortunately nothing was broken and no one was hurt, but it made a big noise and a big mess!), other students were hitting each other and chasing wach other during a lab, others were just hormonal teenagers who wouldn't talk or listen to me after I took their cellphones away and the list goes on. Interestingly enough, though, I find myself grinning uncontrollably about it afterwards. I am learning to laugh at their shortcomings rather that get angered by them. (Don't worry, I still lay down the law; in fact, I think my students thought I was rather grumpy this week because I did a lot of reeming so they would know that I was serious. It turns out that students don't take you seriously when you're smiling, and the only way to wipe the permasmile off my face is to be stern and maybe a little angry sounding.)

Life is just worlds better when you focus on the beautiful things in life rather than the things that you don't like, when you can't do anything about it! I'm learning that even venting doesn't make me feel any better; it helps people understand where your coming from and makes them feel some pity, but it doesn't really cheer me up! I'm all about a good story, but it's more fun to tell it in terms of how funny it was that something happened than how mad it made me!

Well, it's time to get to some long weekend grading for my lovely students! I'm glad I have a job that is secure in these tough economic times! I'm glad I can do this service for these lovely young adolescent minds and I hope I don't live up to my funny motto when I feel like a failure: "Destroying America one middle schooler at a time!"