“Grace”

A high school senior fixated on languages and literature, I’d just finished enacting the witch scene from Macbeth, the one in which a spell is cast; and as I was so very close to the end of my K-12 student career in our relatively small community, I’d acted that infamous scene out without inhibition—feigned accent, corny cackles, cauldron-stirring hands.  I was shameless from beginning to end, and my teacher seemed to absolutely love it. 

I remember hanging out much longer than usual after class that day.  After all, the very last thing I wanted to do was give any of my classmates a chance to say something to me about my performance.  I remember too that my teacher looked at me, after everyone else was out of sight, and asked me if I was doing okay; and as she waited for my response, she smiled and told me that I was a great Macbeth witch.  It was like she somehow knew I was a little embarrassed that I’d gone so deep into the part, that I had let it take me over in front of my peers.

“I think I’d just really like to be the pretty one for once, not the smart one or the theatrical one, but the breathtakingly beautiful one,” I told her rather suddenly, wondering inside of myself what in the world had happened to all of my teenage inhibitions.  In the span of less than half an hour, I’d turned myself into a Shakespearean witch in front of all my peers and then bared my soul to my senior high school English teacher.  I remember thinking that I’d found my way to the proverbial Twilight Zone—and I wasn’t at all sure how to feel about it.

I also remember hearing my teacher say the most remarkable thing back to me that noteworthy day.  “You’re wishing for something you already have, Angie; you are beautiful.  So, don’t sell yourself short.  And please try to always remember that brains are breathtakingly beautiful too.”  Never in my life had I had a teacher say such a thing to me, such a lovely thing, such a needed thing.  Yes, that day in that unexpected zone, I was encouraged, commanded really, to be exactly who I was and to try to stop worrying about who everyone else around me was.

It was a game-changing moment for me.  While I do still waver at times when I notice the lives of others who seem to be so much more together than I am, I know I can always go back to those words my teacher spoke to me.  And as I went on my way that day, I heard her say something else to me like, “God made you you for good reasons, so don’t ever give up on you, ok?!” 

If my teacher did this for me, I can only imagine what she did, over her many decades of teaching, for other students who came before and after I did.  What a gift she was and still is!  I thank God for her, for Grace, because that’s her name—and a perfect name for her it is; and as Grace battles an illness she was recently diagnosed with, I know she’ll do so with the very same kind of grace she embodied with me three decades ago.