One Crisis at a Time

“Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters.” — Colossians 3:23

I spent two days filling in as a substitute for a 6th-grade class. Being back in that environment reminded me less of my old routine and more of Hurricane Harvey. You know that feeling—the skies open up, the downpour inundates you, and just when you think you’ve weathered the worst of it, another outer band swings through and hits you with a fresh wave. That’s what seven intermediate school class periods in a row feel like.

And that is not an insult to the students, who were actually very nice. For nearly thirty years, teaching classes all day was my stock-in-trade.

But somewhere between the chaos of the bell schedule and repeating the exact same instructions to the class, I realized a switch had flipped in my head.

Steven Pressfield, in his book about “turning pro,” describes the shift from amateur to professional as an internal decision, not a change in your paycheck. For years, I was a teacher who wrote. Standing in that classroom this week, realizing how much I missed the quiet discipline of my desk at home, I finally admitted the truth: I am now a writer who occasionally teaches.

If that sounds arrogant coming from a retired teacher with zero book deals, well, join the club. I’m still trying to convince myself, too. I don’t know what makes somebody a professional writer. If it’s being paid to write, then I guess I’m a wannabe professional writer. Whatever the case, the first thing I think about in the mornings now—after asking Becky to “please point me toward the coffee”—is what I’m gonna write about this morning.

The difference is how I approach the work.

In almost thirty years of teaching economics and other subjects, I absolutely hated turning in lesson plans. To me, they were performative busywork—a way for administrators to either mindlessly check a box or perform the equivalent of a colonoscopy on my methods. I always believed teaching was instinctive. You can’t map out a room full of teenagers like a train schedule. You have to read the room. You have to know when to ditch the script and chase an ancillary topic because that’s where the real learning is happening.

When I was teaching my AP Macroeconomics classes, I could feel in my soul that I was doing what I was called to do, and that was the most satisfying feeling in the world. I loved my life as a teacher in the classroom. But I’ve moved on to something else that now gives me that same deep sense that I’m doing exactly what I’m supposed to do with my life. That may be the most powerful feeling I know.

That is why I resist it when “experts” tell me I need a lesson plan for Facebook. They talk about algorithms, boosting metrics, and engagement strategies. They want me to engineer posts to please a robot.

I have no interest in doing that. If that is what it takes to be “successful” here, I’ll pass.

I don’t want to write for an algorithm; I want to write for people. I want to share honest stories from my heart and mind that might point someone toward the way Jesus asks us to walk—not as a preacher, but as a fellow traveler.

I’ve come to view this Facebook page not as my final destination, but as a port of call. It’s like Cozumel on one of our cruises. We get off the boat, we walk around, maybe we buy a T-shirt for the grandsons—but we aren’t moving there. We are just passing through on our way to something better, like when the buffet rolls out fried shrimp and pork ribs.

For me, the destination is the book I want to write. And the writers who have gone before say the same thing: nobody wants to read your work unless you make it so clear, engaging, and valuable that they would almost be crazy not to keep going. To get there, I have to do the work here. I have to treat this “port of call” with respect.

So, I’m showing up today. I don’t have a lesson plan. I’m not checking the metrics. I’m just trusting my instincts, sitting at my desk—which is happily much quieter than a 6th-grade or even a 12th-grade classroom—and taking it one sentence, one crisis, and one opportunity at a time.

. . . and that’s what I know today.