The Mess Is the Work
What makes the mess bearable is knowing what is being built.
By: Jeremy Case, eighth grade History teacher and Curriculum chair
New AC units have just been installed. Updated LED lighting is replacing fixtures that have hummed over our classrooms for decades. The parking lot is preparing for fresh pavement, and a completely new building will soon begin to rise in the shadow of the Atrium.
Perimeter is in the middle of several major construction projects this year, if you haven’t noticed. Your students certainly have. Lunch has moved to a different spot occasionally to accommodate the work. Carline has snaked along a new route. Some things are a little different right now.
Every time there is a disruption, students ask the same question. Why? They feel the inconvenience immediately: the different lunch table, the longer line, and they cannot see the purpose behind it.
I ask that question more often than I would like to admit. As a teacher and parent of middle schoolers, why is the question I reach for on the hardest days, when the mess in front of me is loud and the purpose is not yet obvious.
Here is what I keep having to relearn.
Every one of these facilities projects started with an end already in mind. Construction and renovation by necessity are messy, disruptive, and slow. They usually cost more than anyone hoped, and they are certainly paved with obstacles nobody saw coming until they were standing in the middle of them.
Our students are in the middle of their own construction project.
Ephesians 2:10 names this project: Paul calls them God's workmanship, made for good works He prepared long before either of us arrived on the job.
Ours is not the work of bulldozers and cranes, however. It is closer to hammers and brushes, the patient work of shaping a life up close, one day and one conversation at a time.
Charlotte Mason describes this same architecture in her volume, Ourselves. Every child, she wrote, is a kind of estate still under construction, governed through what she called the House of Body, the House of Mind, the House of Heart, and the House of Soul, each one requiring its own careful attention before the whole stands complete.
Paul gives us the blueprint in Romans 12:2.
“Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.”
That is the educational half of what we are doing at Perimeter School, the House of Mind under renovation, being renewed.
Paul gives us the other half in Philippians 2:12-13.
“Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, so now, not only as in my presence but much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.”
That is the slow sanctifying work no curriculum can do within the House of Heart and the House of Soul. It is the Spirit's work, and it is our mission as parents and teachers to join Him in that redeeming work.
Do you know who is not frustrated in the middle of construction? The workers. They know the purpose of the process, and each knows the part he has been given to bring it to completion. He does not merely endure the dust. He delights in joining in the work.
What makes the mess bearable is knowing what is being built. The inconvenience only feels frustrating when we lose sight of the finished vision. The same is true of raising and educating children. The daily disruptions and setbacks make more sense when we remember that God is building something that cannot be rushed.
Education and discipleship, parenting and teaching, none of it comes without distraction and dust, hardship and headaches, in equal measure.
My calling, and the calling every teacher and parent shares, is to teach and parent not just the child standing in front of us today, but the person God has called him/her to become too. That takes a kind of holy dissatisfaction, refusing to settle for who they are right now without ever losing sight of who they are becoming in Christ.
This renovation is not only happening in your child. It is happening in us as teachers, and it is happening in you as parents.
So, the next time you reroute through yet a different carline, let it preach to you. The mess is the work.
