Changing the Color of the Routine Blues

by Eileen Berry

I sighed as I began looking over my notes for the workshop on teaching writing that I would be giving in another week. There everything was again—the same old outline, the same old graphics on the handout, the same old reminders to myself scribbled on pink sticky notes. And inwardly, my heart rebelled at the thought of giving this same old workshop yet again. “I’m so tired of speaking about this topic,” I thought. “How can I possibly make it seem fresh and new to myself, let alone to my audience?”

All of us teachers get them sometimes—“the blues of the routine.” We tire of repeating information year after year to each new crop of students. So we scour our resources for the most current ideas and techniques; we ransack our minds for fresh illustrations; we use technology to spice up our visual aids; we update and reinvent and seek to outdo ourselves each time the lesson comes around again.

Keeping current and avoiding stagnation is certainly to be commended in our teaching as it is in every area of life. But perhaps the real answer for the blues of the routine lies not so much in reinventing ourselves as in looking outside of ourselves—and infinitely higher than ourselves.

Those familiar verses at the beginning of Romans 12 urge the believer to present his body as a living, holy sacrifice to God. But how do I do this? I must renew my mind, transforming the way that I think about my life’s purpose in the will of God. The passage then goes on to detail what I can do with the gifts He has given me. I am to use them in service to others in the body of Christ. The latter half of the chapter exhorts me to love unhypocritically, to be devoted to others, and to prefer others before myself. And in this way I offer spiritual service to the Head of the body, who is Christ Himself.

So, the key to avoiding the blues is to change the way I think about my service. There is nothing mundane about teaching that lesson on multiplication or guiding the students through that science experiment when it is viewed as an offering, an act of spiritual worship to my Savior and King. And there is nothing menial about serving my students when I think that each one has his own unique purpose in the will of God—a purpose that I am equipping him in some way to fulfill. My service to my students is a stewardship of God’s gifts to me and a labor of love for them as fellow members of the body of Christ. What a high calling!

Does that sound like a too-easy fix, too theoretical or not practical enough for the everyday world of pencils and keyboards and stacks of tests to grade? Try letting these truths roll around in your mind for a while when you start getting bogged down in the blues of your routine. It may surprise you how the colors of your everyday world will change.

Eileen Berry teaches Writing for Children at BobJonesUniversity and is an author at BJU Press.