Can Planning Inhibit Grace?
There are many aspects to life which are inherently good. But it seems that we have the knack of taking those gifts from the Creator and using them in a way that is not good.
Planning can be one of those aspects to life, even in our school contexts. We need to make our plans and we need to follow through with our preparations. That is being a good steward of the resources that God gives to us. In our schools, that includes being intentional about what we propose to do in our classes, each and every time.
Eugene Peterson explains it this way in his introduction to the book of Numbers. He acknowledges that we need relational help to live in Godly community, but he also notes that we need planning:
We need organizational help. When people live together in community, jobs have to be assigned, leaders appointed, inventories kept. Counting and list-making and rosters are as much a part of being a community of God as prayer and instruction and justice. Accurate arithmetic is an aspect of becoming a people of God. (The Message, NavPress, 2022, p.222)
But when does such planning become an inhibitor to grace? Perhaps it is when we stop listening to the circumstances in which people find themselves. Perhaps it is when we stop listening to God. Perhaps that is when we no longer can discern when we are working to the spirit of the law or the letter of the law.
The Apostle Paul expressed it this way:
Galatians 5:4-6 I suspect you would never intend this, but this is what happens. When you attempt to live by your own religious plans and projects, you are cut off from Christ, you fall out of grace. Meanwhile we expectantly wait for a satisfying relationship with the Spirit. For in Christ, neither our most conscientious religion nor disregard of religion amounts to anything. What matters is something far more interior: faith expressed in love. [The Message]
Can this really happen in our classroom and schools? Yes, and easily. When we are more concerned with the form of something rather than its essence, we can fail to discern what is right and wrong before God – that includes what is right and wrong about what we teach and how we teach it.
It is why us teachers can become too quickly caught up with the latest technique for our classrooms and turn it into a ‘must have’ way of doing something. Many times, these latest ideas are but a part of truth which take the position of being an absolute. This is a path to idolatry, and does not allow us to discern, through prayer and mediation on God’s Word, what is just and merciful.
At those times we do not express faith through love – we express a restrictive teaching type of Pharisaism. Let’s pray for the grace to do more of the former, and for the wisdom to know when we are sliding into the later.
Amen.
Blessings,
Stephen Fyson