Teacher, Stagehand, Coach

When I was in the Marine Corps I was a linguist. It’s a job that takes a lot of training, even at its most basic level, because you have to learn the language first in addition to everything else. Indeed the entire field in which I worked was one that required considerable training and technical knowledge. It took two years from the day I left home for boot camp to the day I finally finished all my training schools and arrived at my first real duty station. And, while all that training was important, I didn’t really learn my job until I was doing it on deployment in Iraq. I was probably in my best working condition around the time my second deployment was winding down and I was getting ready to finish out my time of service.

Which is kind of a pity, if you think about it. I was a well-trained operator and I was getting really good at my job, and then I was gone. (There’s a reason I had to sign up for a five-year enlistment instead of a four-year one).

All this to say, I have a distinct memory of one of the Sergeants or Staff NCOs saying something to me that I have never forgotten, despite having forgotten who it was that said it:

He said, “I would take one excellent teacher over a dozen excellent operators.”

I remembered feeling a little suspicious about this at the time because I felt as though I excelled in my field, and his comment seemed to make that unimportant. To make me unimportant, as a mere ‘do-er’ rather than a ‘teacher.’

But he was so very right, especially in that context. I still struggle with the pride that wants to be a center-stage do-er rather than the guide to help someone else do something, but I’m a mom now, so I am being forced to wrestle with this fact and this role.

The reason he wanted a good teacher over a good worker or specialist (and this applies regardless of profession) is because the teacher makes good workers. If you’re a skilled linguist, you do good work and then you finish your service, retire, or move on. Good teachers are a fountain that brings forth more and more people who are good at their job. Rather than being an excellent product, they are an excellence factory.

The other day my husband was telling me that a certain—very intense—military training course is now going to be stocked with the best-skilled in that field, whereas before they often sent their problem children to get them out of the way. They finally realized that if you send your ‘problem children’ to teach, you get poor results. Instead of amplified positive, you get amplified negative. Seems obvious, but it isn’t because you have to take a hit by sending your best away from the job.

The thing is, going to be a teacher isn’t what most of these guys want to do. It isn’t what I ever wanted to do. We want to be in the action, doing the work we trained to do…we want to be the product not the producer. Ironically, for a lot of these guys, being really good at what they do may bar them from getting to do it, because they need to train others to be like they are. And they probably don’t want to. They’d rather stay ‘in the field.’

Military setting aside, it’s what nearly all of us want to do. We don’t want to be on the sidelines coaching the game, we want to be in the game. It’s kind of a trope, isn’t it? The player gets injured or something bad happens, so he’s forced to teach instead of do, right? And everybody feels bad for him, even though he inspires everyone else towards success. There’s a definite loss there.  A sadness. A pain in giving up the thing you really wanted to do in order to help others do it.

Regarded differently, it’s a pain in giving up the spotlight. It’s the pain of humility.

Since becoming a mom I realized that I had bought into one of the worst and strangest cultural lies that we have: that being a mom is ‘mere.’ “She’s just a mom.” “Oh she was so talented, she could have done so much, but then she just had a bunch of kids instead.” “Wasted potential.” “Stereotypical soccer mom.” “1950’s Stepford wife.”

I just finished watching an episode of Gilmore Girls which shows a crop of look-alike, blonde, be-sweatered mean-moms antagonizing Lorelei for talking to their children about her teen pregnancy. It is repeatedly emphasized that Lorelei (our protagonist) can’t be bothered to remember their names, much less tell them apart. It is strongly implied that they are all narrow and dull, whereas Lorelei is the unique exception to this mom-rule.

Love the show, but Lorelei is a jerk sometimes!

We give lip-service to motherhood, and people appreciate their own moms, but at a deep level, there seems to be a fierce cultural dissatisfaction with this role of bringing children up in the way they should go. It’s hard. It’s exhausting. It’s domestic (ah, how we’ve learned to fear that word. At least, I always have). There’s no glory, and the adventures, while not necessarily lacking, are confined to what you can do with a baby strapped to your back or toddling at your side.

I think our culture has such a strange duality about this: “Mothers are lovely and we are all so grateful for them. I wouldn’t want to be one—I have more important things to do with my life—but aren’t they quite nice to admire from a comfortable distance?”

Motherhood lacks so many things that we associate with importance and value: public recognition, financial gain, political influence, prestige, awards, titles, and the chance to ‘go down in history.’ And it has so many things we dislike: exhaustion, prosaicness, restrictions, a small sphere, and continual sacrifice. (Ask my mom, mother of 6 adult children: the job does not end when they leave the house. They call you. They ask your advice. They want you to come visit for a weekend and watch the baby so that you and your husband can run a half-marathon. Thanks mom and dad, by the way!)

I do know a number of women (now moms) who wanted to be moms since they were very little, and I deeply respect this and am grateful for them. They saw something in motherhood that I was too busy or self-centered to see. I wanted to be “great” in the eyes of our culture, heroic and adventurous, untethered and a little bit dangerous. I wanted to be, and be seen as, clever and strong and wild.

Like this.

Zoe Washburne, from Firefly. Battle-ready.

Or this.

Mulan

 But wild is not usually the first word that jumps to one’s lips when thinking about being a mom. Shamefully, I have resented not being the image of myself that I cultivated and idolized. But, of course, that is the key word. Idol. And those things have to be smashed to pieces before we can really be anything at all.

Slowly (SO VERY SLOWLY) I am coming to understand what that fellow Marine said to me all that while ago. Someone may be a math genius. Someone else may have some world-changing skill. And that is wonderful and God-given, for certain. But if you’re a good teacher (one of the key facets of motherhood) and are bringing up godly, compassionate, hard-working, loving, strong, wise children, then what you have to offer is, by the grace of God, being amplified and scattered like seed on good ground.

I am indicted by two of my all-time favorite authors, both speaking of motherhood:

"The homemaker has the ultimate career. All other careers exist for one purpose only--and that is to support the ultimate career."

-C.S. Lewis

"Why be something to everyone when you can be everything to someone?"

-G.K. Chesterton

I see these quotes and nod with my head, and agree with my intellect, knowing how desperately grateful I am for my parents or for anyone who does the hard, quiet thing. But my pride bucks and kicks. My heart shrinks at the perceived “smallness” of the task, even though it isn’t small. It is hard to confess, but it isn’t what I wanted or imagined. It doesn’t look like all the guts and glory I planned for myself. I spoke about this in a recent post on dying to yourself, and I don’t know how many times or from how many angles I’ll have to preach it to myself before I really learn—really understand—what dying to yourself actually means.

There are so many ways God teaches this to us, but I must say that motherhood is an astoundingly rigorous and unique school for it. Thus I am a student of Christ, and a teacher of his children and--rather than imbibing the culture’s slow, subtle devaluing of it all--I need to open my eyes see that for the beautiful thing that it is.

Already Dead

A good long while ago, my husband and I were watching the Band of Brothers series, a dramatization of the wartime actions of Easy Company in the 101st Airborne Division, during WWII. I had never seen it, but I love history, particularly WWII history, so I was enjoying it immensely.

During the first few episodes we discussed the various characters—who are all drawn, however dramatically, from real men who really lived and really had these experiences—and how and why such and such a man would act such and such a way, etc. My husband told me that his favorite character wasn’t actually the calm, serious, eminently moral Lieutenant Winters—the ostensible series protagonist—but the almost silent, hard-bitten, rumored-to-be-ruthless Lieutenant Speirs.

Throughout a portion of the series, most of the soldiers hold this Lieutenant as a mystery, and tell semi-mythic stories about his brutal wartime actions. He is not the classic protagonist, but he is tough and enigmatic, and it is one of his lines that struck me as the most powerful.

In one scene, there is a soldier who is paralyzed by fear. He is hiding in a foxhole when he should be taking action. He is ashamed of himself, but he can’t seem to break out of the fear strait-jacket.

Lieutenant Speirs walks up to him, crouches at the foxhole and tells him the ultimate paradox: “The only hope you have is to accept the fact that you’re already dead. The sooner you accept that, the sooner you’ll be able to function as a soldier is supposed to function.” The reason that soldier had become useless is because he was unwilling to give up his life…to give himself wholly over to the task at hand.

Lieutenant Speirs, on the other hand, figured he was as good as dead already, and for this he was able to be courageous, decisive, and capable in the midst of a horrible and life-threatening situation.

This is the classic Christian paradox shown true in an entirely secular context: the harder you try to cling to your life, the more useless that life is to you. It becomes a waste. You become paralyzed—“dead” in effect, as far as anything meaningful or purposeful is concerned. Try to save your life, you lose it. Give your life up and you might survive, and save many other lives along the way.

True in battle, true in life.

More recently, I watched some films and TV shows in which characters—who were not the heroes—sacrificed themselves for the sake of the greater goal. They got no glory. In some cases they scarcely had names or faces. In others, they were the convenient scapegoat which enabled the Hero or Heroine to live. This culminated in my watching Mockingjay Part 1; I was struck by two scenes in which nameless characters took coordinated action against the oppressive government and, in so doing, ensured their own deaths. It was very moving to me, but I found myself resistant to this idea. Perhaps a few survived, but most of the people in those uprisings had to know that they were going to die. They were cannon fodder for the sake of the higher goal of defeating the Capitol. If they didn’t believe in their cause with all their heart, soul, and body, one might say they had just been used and discarded in a heartless and utilitarian manner. But they had to want to fight, badly, to do that. It had to mean something to them.

It bothered me. It had me wondering if I would ever, for the right reasons, have the courage to be like that: to run into the cannon’s mouth without having any hope of survival, or any hint of fame or glory, just so that someone else can get past the cannon to do something greater. To die quietly so someone else can live loudly. Would I ever be willing to be the nameless not-hero who enables the victory without anyone ever noticing or caring?

I realized that I always want to be ‘the main character.’ Because not only is the main character the hero, but they usually survive, albeit with a few cuts and bruises. It’s those unnamed characters in the gray background that die in spades so that the protagonist can scrape through at the last second and see what all that fighting and dying earned. Because if you die without seeing the end, how do you know that it was really worth it? How do you know you weren’t being duped?

I find this mentality—mine—a problem. Not only are we “already dead,” as Lieutenant Speirs put it, but if we’re obsessed with being the hero—the name of renown—we aren’t going to get anything done either. Our role may be small. It may not be flashy. There may be a hundred other people doing the exact same small thing. But if it serves the higher goal, does it matter if no one ever sees us or knows our name?

Besides, if you’re not willing to sacrifice something—or yourself—because you can’t prove right now that it will have been worth it, you would never sacrifice yourself for anything. It takes faith—in a cause or in person. In God.

It reminds me of Brother Lawrence, a monk whose duties were very low and mundane; he worked in the kitchen, and it was tedious. No glory. No grandness. No heroism. Just simple work that has to be redone every day (like the dishes, which are the most depressing and endless of chores). But he took “do everything as unto the Lord” to heart. He did scrubbing as unto the Lord. How was he able to do this? How could he be so humble and patient in his heart with such dull work?

Because he had already died to himself. He yielded his goals and dreams and preferences to the Lord. The result? His words and advices, written hundreds of years ago, are still read today and influence many. His small work was a seed and it grew great. I don’t know that he ever lived to see it do so either. He couldn’t guess that, in the 2000’s, a young man would read his words and decide to volunteer in a kitchen at a summer camp in order to learn how to honor God in that simple work. He couldn’t know that I would remind myself of Brother Lawrence at times when I am tempted to be angry that my work or my life seem mundane, or lack the glory and adventure that I crave. When I try to cling to my idea of my life, instead of embracing the actual circumstances, I lose. I am paralyzed.

How can we be effective—in war, or in life, or especially in the Kingdom of God? By remembering that we’re dead already, and glad of it despite the way it sounds. Dead to things that chain us down, tether us to our selfish selves, and our foolish plans. We’re free to risk everything, free to be fearless, free to do things small or great with all our hearts, free from the need to be validated by others, free from the need to prove ourselves or measure ourselves against the achievements of others. Because we’re not clutching to our life (or our reputation, or our popularity, or our fame, or our accolades) like a security blanket. And, unlike Speirs, we haven’t given up our lives to become hard or nihilistic. We’ve given them into good hands. God’s. And, if we trust him, we will not regret letting go.

“The best way to live above all fear of death is to die every morning before you leave your bedroom.”

-Charles Spurgeon

No Mere Mortal

Back when I was in the Marine Corps, I spent 18 months in a military language program. In order to be accepted into this job specialty, you had to have scored high on the general military aptitude test, and a specific language-related one. The type of people that ended up in my field tended to be pretty intelligent, by and large.

There was one young man who was in the same program as I was. He was from Alabama and he had a country accent thick as mud. I had never heard an accent that thick in all my life. I’ve always enjoyed any and all accents and I never once thought that this would affect my opinion of anyone in any way.

Well it did. Despite being from a state that many people consider to be a bit of a back-water place, I don’t have much of an accent. Even my Texas grandparents only have a gentle West Texas twang. So when I found out that this goodly Alabama-native with his distinct accent was one of the top students in the graduating class—not to mention that his accent in Arabic was known to be excellent—I was surprised.

And I didn’t see why I should be surprised. I mean, I knew he was a smart guy. In my head, I knew that. What on earth had made me think that he would be anything other than one of the top students?

I knew, but didn’t want to admit, that the reason was because of this country/hick-ish accent (at least that’s what I, in my ignorance of Alabama regions, perceived it to be). This horrified me. I LOVE LANGUAGES, DIALECTS, AND ACCENTS OF ALL KINDS.  I paid better attention in class at University if my prof. had any kind of accent, because I'm a sensory creature and it kept my ears awake. And I abhor the fact that someone will work day and night to excise their native accent from their tongue so as to not be thought unintelligent or uneducated, when an accent has no bearing whatsoever on these things!

It’s a cultural association. In movies and television, a country accent of any kind (and, hey, most accents) becomes short-hand for rural simpleton or some such. Non-American accents become caricaturized, even when this isn’t always the intention. [British accents are the comical exception. The generic British accent carries the connotation of intelligence, regardless of what is being said].

Being what I was at the time—a translator—I mulled this over a great deal. I have a tendency to inadvertently don the accents of whoever I’m around, sometimes to my complete embarrassment as when one fellow Marine asked me “hey, are you from Jersey?” during a two-minute chat with him…because the curve of my words was slowly creeping towards his without my realizing it. [Uh…well, no actually, I’m from Oklahoma so…anyhow…]

I hardly ever do this on purpose and I have no doubt that it carries within it the great potential to be irritating or offensive. But it can be good too. When I lived in Israel I had a British roommate. When she called home, her mom [mum!] said she sounded a bit American, courtesy of me, and I had very unintentional smatterings of her accent in my English by the end of it. We had a good laugh about it. I was flattered to be mistaken for an Iraqi once by an Egyptian [Iraqi Arabic is my favorite dialect], and was thrilled to my bones when one of my parents’ Israeli friends looked at me all of a sudden and said I sounded like a ‘native Israeli who’s maybe just been living in the states for a time.’ Hey. I’ll take it!

So how could I, who believe so fervently in the beauty and nuance of regional dialect and accent, allow myself to tolerate some association of accent with intelligence or linguistic capability? The truth is, I still struggle with it. And the scarier truth is, it isn’t just accents.

I find myself making half-unconscious snap judgments about people—I have watched my mind form these opinions almost as an appalled outsider—from the most obscure physical or auditory markers, and also from some of the more stereotypical things too. What music they listen to. What they look like. How they dress (weirdly, I get leery if people are too well put together). What books they read. Even the tone of voice they are wont to use, and if they use internet acronyms in their speech (this is very hard for me).

Of course this disconcerting fact can come as no surprise to anyone who has studied the entrenched trajectories of racism, prejudice, anti-Semitism, stereotyping, bullying, etc. I acknowledge that this is not shocking or profound information. It just came through the most unexpected venue—a country accent heard by an Oklahoma native.

Yet that’s how we so often interpret the world into our own tongue. Or how we skim through people by short-hand, getting the gist, rather than reading them in full. Running our eyes over the back-cover synopsis, rather than giving the narrative and prose the chance to speak.

I come back to this idea again and again when I interact with people at random. I get Jeremiah’s fire in my bones when I think of how each and every person I meet is beloved of God, and how dare I write someone off as shallow, or uninteresting, or dull, or simple, or unfixable. He made them. They may be broken and fallen, but so am I and so have I been.

C.S. Lewis’s (really, are you surprised?) essay “The Weight of Glory” kicked me in the teeth and humbled me into trying to see everyone I meet with God’s eyes., (yes, even those ones that I don't like because they are like me enough that it grates. You know what I'm talking about). This task is so grand and so weighty, that it should put every one of us face to the ground.

“There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilisations—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendors”

And,

“It may be possible for each to think too much of his own potential glory hereafter; it is hardly possible for him to think too often or too deeply about that of his neighbor.”

So this is about 'average' people that I may only ever speak with once in a grocery store, or read about in a blog, or sit next to on the bus. It’s about the guy who looks like a thug, and who I think just got out of prison recently, who shares his love horses and riding, and surprises me. About the seemingly selfish and shallow girl who has a depth of passion and sensitivity that breaks my heart. About the person who is so different from me in culture or nature or mindset that it’s like stepping into a whole new world. About someone who loves some subject that I’m not even interested in and I’m reminded how simple and confined I am, in a very good way, because I can’t even understand.

I am not trying to idealize here. There will be people who are hard to get along with. Even people who act despicably, and their actions and choices cannot be excused. There are criminals, and liars, and schmoozers, and all sorts and there is no folly in recognizing that and being shrewd about those things. Yes, yes, “be shrewd as serpents and innocent as doves.” That’s not what I’m talking about.

I’m talking about seeing people. I’m talking about the most average interactions, and people that would otherwise—were life a novel—get one throwaway line, or be cast to the side in favor of the main narrative (my narrative? Yours?). I’m talking about bearing the weight of Glory. It goes against everything in us that wants life to be simple and people to be easy and suit our tastes.

Goodness gracious, that’s what my pastor talked about on Sunday, and I just realized it. People are uncomfortable. Get used to it. That’s the body of Christ.

You have never, never, spoken with a mere mortal in your life. Ever.

Discipline is Not a Dirty Word

In light of the fact that language is taking certain shifts these days and words that used to have a positive connotation now have a negative or impotent one and vice versa (i.e. on So You Think You Can Dance, calling a dance “nasty” is generally offered as a high compliment. Or the word “awesome” which is supposed to mean “inspires awe” but instead, apparently, means “that's nice”—and if you’re feeling additionally expressive, it connotes an exclamation point as well) I feel the need to put in a good word for the very good word “discipline.” I don’t want it to get a bad reputation.

The word disciplined still has a fairly decent rap, but disciplinarian is not always well-treated and either word sometimes conjures in the young, modern mind an image of something rigid, binding, unrelenting and, perhaps, uncreative.

I beg to differ. It seems to me that even the most creative of people, if they truly wish to develop that creativity, will be driven to the intense discipline of honing their natural skills. I say this as someone who is not a naturally disciplined person and whatever else I am, I’m not organized. I have spurts of organization (where I will schedule whole months of meals to cook and miles to run) but generally I find discipline difficult. Which is what makes me respect its acquisition so highly.

The Disciplines:

Discipline is a tricky beast and it has a variety of meanings:

1. A parent disciplines a child: Had my parents not done this, I would likely be one of the following: a vagrant, a mercenary, a criminal mastermind, or at least in jail for something or other. I have violent and heartless tendencies, and no amount of sweet-smiled “oh she’ll grow out of it” would have tempered that. I’m STILL working on it.

2. You can study in an academic discipline: I am not so academically keen, but they call them “disciplines” for  a reason. Reading, study, research, verification, comparison, hours and hours and hours.

3. Discipline of habit/persistence: You do something enough times, the discipline becomes habit—an instinctive part of daily life.

4. Disciplined: To be regimented, organized…regularized.

For a Girl Who Doesn’t Like Grammar:

In his essay “The Weight of Glory” C.S. Lewis talks about the transformation of external discipline to intrinsic meaning saying that“…poetry replaces grammar, gospel replaces law, longing transforms obedience, as gradually as the tide lifts a grounded ship.”

It should go noted that the things “replaced” do not actually disappear. Grammar, law and obedience are still present, but their meaning has gone bone-deep.

Furthermore, Lewis talks about the person who aims to acquire a certain knowledge through discipline:

“His position, therefore, bears a certain resemblance to that of the mercenary; the reward he is going to get will, in actual fact, be a natural and proper reward, but he will not know that till he has got it.”

The student, the soldier, the runner—they are working towards a reward that is not instantaneous and which they do not fully understand until its culmination. Discipline and passing pleasures are not much connected. Discipline and lasting ones are.

“…enjoyment creeps in upon the mere drudgery,” he goes on to say. And“…the proper rewards are not simply tacked on to the activity for which they are given but are the activity itself in consummation.”

He give the example of a school child learning Greek grammar (something I suppose few school children do these days. I certainly never did) and the enjoyment of its poetry being the proper reward for the tedious study that preceded it. Yet, he notes, the school-child could not have known how he might enjoy the poetry while he was yet immersed in the tedium. Had this theoretical school child demanded to know what value he would receive at the end of his endeavors, he would have received an explanation he either did not understand, or was disinclined to believe—because the daily study did not, to him, bear the marks of a pleasant, rewarding thing. It was a struggle, and its end was hazy.

In Language:

As I said, I have not studied Greek, but I have studied other languages and the reward of fluency is beyond concise explanation. Suffice it to say it opens up whole new worlds of political media, poetry, literature, culture, music, idiom, perspective and conversation. And it starts with the discipline of use, immersion and persistence.

I couldn't have fully known what it would mean when I was starting fresh with alphabets and vocabulary.

In Running:

Another discipline with which I have become familiar is that of running, and it being a raw physical example doesn’t exclude it from being just as relevant.

When I first-very-first started running I was resistant to the discipline of it. I balked at the mere idea of doing an exercise just for the sake of exercise, which is how I saw it. (I still have a slight aversion to treadmills for their going-nowhere-ness, even though I have used them when they were what was available.)

I remember the first time I ran a mile and a half. I remember how excited I was. I remember two miles. I also remember how long those two miles took me and it was laughable. There was a lot of on-off start-stop running over the years, but eventually a habit formed out of sheer mercenary necessity: I was joining the Marine Corps and I had to be able to run 3 miles in a certain time. And I didn’t want to just pass the test. I wanted to ACE it.

Only now do I know that the rewards of that discipline far outweighed my perception of them. I thought “I’ll have an impressive run time, and be fit.” That happened. But more than that. I found the joy in running. The thrill of a good clip, or a wild trail, or of jumping over things (like snakes). The joy of sunsets and sunrises seen from a dozen different angles. The adventure of happening upon new roads, paths, nooks and crannies. The confidence of increased endurance and knowing how this could be used not only on my behalf, but on behalf of others.

This is one example of a discipline that did far more than present me with its known end of ‘fitness’ and a high-scoring run-time.

In Work:

I suppose it goes without saying that military-types are forced to make an intimate acquaintance with discipline of all kinds. Drilling is a quintessential example of this. In physical training. Martial Arts. Or in rifle drill and marching.

One movement. Conducted over and over. And over. ‘Till you bleed. ‘Till your bruised. ‘Till you want to fall over.

The end result? An instinct of the muscles so inherent that your mind need not translate for your body in order for it to know what to do. This is an example of an utterly pragmatic discipline that can also be used in mercenary fashion. You may not realize its worth until the day that your body reacts precisely as it must to the right prompt without it having ever occurred to your mind. Obviously this can be misused as well. Pavlovian responses can easily be good or bad, but in military environments they are about creating survival/offensive/defensive instincts that the average individual may not inherently possess.

This is where the word “discipline” acquires some of its negative connotations. People see uniforms; uniforms connote uniformity; uniformity makes people think of automatons. I—having been in the military—understand but disagree. We forget that we are GLAD when we have created instinctive physical reactions for ourselves when—say—we’re in the car. We turn on the blinker without thinking, check the mirrors, and our foot switches between brake, gas (and/or clutch) without our mind having to get involved. If we had to think too hard about it, this would be a problem. Like I said: this visceral sort of discipline can be well or badly used.

In Everything, Really

So there are disciplines that produce joy in their own right—true, deep joy—and there are other disciplines that have less monumental, less bone-deep rewards but which are satisfying nonetheless: I have been working on simple disciplines which make life smoother…like putting things away in a drawer and a closet when I am done with them. It’s so basic, but I have a tendency not to do it. I’m practicing. The thing is, I find it unlikely that the heights of my joy in life will come from putting a shirt away in the closet. But you know what? There is a tiny sigh of contentment when I think of the tedious work I’m saving myself from so that I have time to do other things…like run, or write this blog post.

So no, you may not necessarily have giddy highs when you scrub down the bathroom on that day that you have disciplined yourself to always scrub it down. But nor will you feel overwhelmed. And besides, a job well and consistently done does make me smile. Sometimes it actually does make me feel a little giddy. Without the discipline it might just make me feel exhausted instead of satisfied.

Take it from someone who had to be disciplined at a higher rate that most of her siblings because she was such a hellion—from someone who dreaded growing up because she thought it would not consist of sufficient tree-climbing and irresponsible running-about—from someone who prefers oblique paths to properly angled ones—from someone who is a fence-hopper and a roof-climber—from someone who finds grammar a scary and unknowable monster of a thing…I like real, true discipline. And boy do I ever need it. Disciple comes from that word. And discipleship.

For some people who have better natural inclinations than I, the verse “He will die for lack of discipline…” in Proverbs may seem extreme. But maybe not. Even the highest quality material still needs to be tempered, honed. It still needs the dross burned off.