Grace Community Christian Church

 

Archived Things Above

Goodbye, Bus (2/2/05)

I quit my bus driving job last week. In some ways I'm going to miss it, but in other ways, I'm glad to see it go.

I began driving two years ago when it was questionable whether or not the church would be able to keep up my salary following a particularly tough time. To your credit & God's glory, the financial giving has more than surpassed the needs, & I can confidently leave my "safety-net" behind.

I will miss the camaraderie with the other substitute drivers. I will miss driving those honking big buses. And most of all, I will miss the kids. In two years of driving, I only had one fight (two middle school boys in the middle of Butterfly Lane) & one suspension (elementary school kid on Taney Avenue with a nasty habit of yanking girls' hair, hard.) Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed teaching them the Greek alphabet, inventing exotic destinations, & converting the bus into airplanes, submarines, space ships & cruise ships. Countless kids entered school every morning wondering about their driver's flowered hat & mental state (especially the morning I told the Whittier Elementary kids to pack their parachutes & come back to the bus because they were all going to skydive through the eye of a hurricane.) But that didn't bother me, because at least they went in smiling. One of their first interactions with an adult had been positive, & that's exactly what I'd been shooting for.

On the other hand, I will enjoy getting to my study earlier. Reading more. Praying more. Writing & reflecting & thinking & studying more. I have missed that. Perhaps even meeting with some guys early, for discipleship time. That would be sweet!

The hard part about "ministry" is rarely having a definitive, measurable "success benchmark." I mean, I knew when I had done my bus job well, because all the kids got picked up & dropped off, & I didn't have to think about it at all until the next morning. But in "ministry", it's not that clearly defined. How do you measure life change? Spiritual maturity? Answered prayer? Faith cultivation? One of the hardest parts of ministry is its sometimes vague, ambiguous, immeasurable nature.

What's ironic is those same frustrations often yield tremendous fulfillment to me: Someone calls to say they've identified & mastered a sin that has gripped them for years! Or a prayer has been answered! Or they've obeyed God somewhere in their life & now see His providing hand at work! Or they finally understand a passage in the Bible that has stymied them for a long time. Or they've made a commitment or a sacrifice that had them scared to death & now they wish they'd done it sooner.

So goodbye bus. Hello ministry, full-steam, once again, ambiguity & all.

But the hat stays.


Jim Dewar --