By: Charis Bootsma
I have terrible eyesight. I can hardly see anything without my glasses. In fact, if you took them away from me, any object more than four inches away from my face would become blurry. As an administrator at a Christian school, my physical weakness sometimes extends to my profession as well.
Leading and working in schools requires good vision and sight. Schools discuss vision statements all of the time; we create Graduate Profiles, we promote our core values, we release catchy slogans for new capital campaigns. The trouble with leading and working in schools, however, is that sometimes, our vision can get blurry. This happens for a myriad of reasons: the tyranny of the urgent plagues us and we are frequently looking down at problems instead of up and forward; our contexts change and so what we think we see is actually something entirely different; we encounter the same problems over and over again and we can’t picture a solution anymore; we are so used to looking at things the same way, looking at things with our “current prescription”, that our eyes unfocus and we no longer see reality as crisply. And sometimes, it’s simply that it is April and the vision we started the school year with is blurry.
Moving forward with bad vision can be dangerous or costly. Thankfully, there are solutions. If you’re like me—plagued with weak eyes—then you are most likely familiar with the phoropter. A phoropter is a machine that eye doctors use to test their patients’ vision. It’s big, bulky, and has different lenses of varying strengths. The patient looks through the phoropter at a poster of letters to test out the lenses. If you’ve been to the eye doctor, you know the drill:
“Okay, tell me if Lens One or Two is better,” says the eye doctor, switching quickly between the lenses. “One… or Two. One… or Two.” The row of letters you’re looking at changes ever so slightly as the lenses switch. Once the examination is done and you have looked through the different options, the eye doctor writes a prescription for your vision. Then, you get to walk out of the doctor’s office with a pair of new glasses that help you see.
The beauty of working in education is that when we gather with each other, we actually act as phoropter machines for one another. Not only is this beautiful, it is also necessary. Educators must gather, must collaborate, must see schools through each other’s eyes. Schools must make space for teachers to gather with administration and other staff, and must make space to gather with other schools. When educators gather, lenses are sharpened or even borrowed and lent out. “Which is better in this scenario?” we can ask each other. “Option One… or Two?” When we do this, we can start to see our schools a little bit more clearly.
Several months ago, a student pulled me aside as our weekly Chapel service was starting. She was upset that another student she was in conflict with wasn’t receiving any punishment like she was. She confided the following in me: “I have to go to these different meetings because of what happened, but she never has to. It just seems unfair.” After listening to the student, I asked her, “Do you think that just because you don’t see what’s going on with that student, that nothing is happening?” She agreed that no, that couldn’t be true. After our conversation, we walked into Chapel together. As we entered the space, the worship leader was leading the school in the song “Waymaker.” The student and I took our seats, and around us, the school sang the bridge of the song: “Even when I don’t see it, you’re working. Even when I don’t feel it, you’re working. You never stop, you never stop working.” As I realized what the students were singing, I caught sight of the back of a sophomore’s bright pink shirt. It read, “I see what God sees.”
Sometimes, we lose sight of what we are doing and why we are doing it. When this inevitably happens, we must gather with one another to sharpen our lenses, to borrow each other’s glasses, and to call each other to see what God sees.
