Home Is Where My People Are: The Roads That Lead Us to Where We Belong (23 page)

I filled out everything pretty quickly, and when I walked back to the reception window to hand the secretary the clipboard with all my forms, she asked if I could stay for just a few minutes and talk to the superintendent, a man named Dr. Hughes. What I wanted to tell her was OF COURSE I CAN; I AM TRYING TO MAKE FRIENDS HERE AND ALSO I NEED A JOB, but I went with a more conservative response and said, “Yes, ma’am
 
—I’d be glad to talk to him.” She led me back to his office.

Dr. Hughes asked me a few initial questions: what brought me to Baton Rouge, where had I grown up in Mississippi, what was my church background, etc. We couldn’t have talked more than ten minutes when he interrupted me and said something I’ve never forgotten: “Sophie, I don’t believe in coincidences. The fact is that we need somebody who can teach Spanish and English. I have some high school Spanish classes that I need
to cover along with one seventh grade English. And the fact that you just walked in pretty much off the street
 
—just ‘happened’ to see our ad and call this morning
 
—and you’re certified in both of those subjects? That’s no accident. I think you’ll be a good fit here, and I’d like to hire you.”

I stared at him for what seemed like hours. I didn’t have any words.

Oh, but I had thoughts.

First thought:
DID HE SAY “SPANISH”?

Second thought:
HE SAID “SPANISH.”

Third thought:
BUT HE SAID “ENGLISH,” TOO.

Fourth thought:
!!!!!

Finally I answered him. “It sounds great to me, but I’ll need to talk to my husband,” I said. The word
husband
almost seemed like a foreign language.

“Fair enough,” he responded. “Just give us a call tomorrow or the next day and let us know.”

I walked out of that building with the most surreal sense of peace. I climbed in my car, cranked up the AC, drove to David’s office, and pretty much ran to his desk so I could tell him the news.

“Well, I got a job,” I announced.

“You’re kidding! Where? Doing what?”

“At Grandview Christian
 
—just a couple of miles down the road. Teaching one seventh grade English class
 
—and Spanish.” I grinned.

Part of me wanted to cry a little bit when I said it. I mean, it was my
third
Spanish job
 
—but at some point you just have to accept that God is up to something, you know?

“Well, that was quick!” David said. “Congratulations and good for you
 
—it sounds awesome.”

His enthusiasm took away some of the español-related sting.

As soon as I got home, I called Dr. Hughes and told him I’d take the job.

As an added bonus, I didn’t have to start work for seven more weeks
 
—which meant I’d have all the time in the world for watching more
Knots Landing
reruns as well as ALLEGED stolen wheelchair adventures.

It was a win all the way around.

Grandview met for its first day of in-service on a humid, stifling day in early August. The faculty and staff were kicking off the school year with a praise-and-worship lunch at a banquet hall in St. Francisville, and while that whole setup was a little strange to me at the time, I now know that folks in south Louisiana will figure out how to turn anything into a special event
 
—even if it’s a Christian school convocation where the strongest drink is a cup of dark roast Community Coffee.

As I drove up Highway 61 that morning, I was a bundle of conflicting emotions. On one hand, I was super curious to meet the other teachers and see what the school was all about, but on the other hand, I was totally overwhelmed by the fact that, save Dr. Hughes, I didn’t know a soul. That borderline introvert/extrovert was completely at odds, because while I couldn’t wait to finally meet some people, it stressed me out that I was going to have to do a lot of talking in order to make that happen.

You can appreciate my dilemma.

After I pulled into the gravel parking lot, I found a spot and carefully walked to the entrance. I’ve been known to trip and fall at the most inopportune times, and I didn’t want my first impression to be as the New Girl Who Twisted Her Ankle before Convocation. Thankfully I made it inside without any injuries, so I grabbed a program, found a seat, and tried to take in my surroundings. There was an array of instruments set up on a platform in front of me, and given my traditional Methodist background, it took several seconds before I realized,
Ohhhhh
 
—those are for our worship time
. I could hear the
clink
and
clank
of silverware behind me as servers set the tables for lunch, and as more and more people filed into the hall, I found myself captivated by the sound of all those south Louisiana accents.

I had never heard anyone pronounce “the Lord” as “the Lard” before. Or mention how they needed to be back in Baton Rouge “for two o’clock.” Or wonder aloud if they were going to have time to “make the groceries” before supper.

I was as tickled as I could be.

Gradually people started to take their seats, and I forced my inner introvert out of her comfort zone by introducing myself to a few folks. Several of them commented on my Mississippi accent, an occurrence that was somewhat intriguing to me considering that (1) I thought I sounded perfectly normal, (2) I didn’t realize that the Mississippi accent was particularly distinctive, and (3) how could they possibly single out
my
accent when I had just overheard an entire conversation about MAKING THE GROCERIES?

Dr. Hughes opened our service with prayer and asked the praise band to lead us in worship. I’d been to Christian concerts before (HOLLA, Amy Grant), but that day was a first for me in terms of participating in a worship service with a full-fledged band. Everybody seemed to know the contemporary worship songs by heart, so I tried to be inconspicuous as I glanced at the lyrics on the projector screen up front
 
—lest people think they had a heathen in their midst. The first couple of songs weren’t even remotely familiar to me, so when we finally landed on “Lord, I Lift Your Name on High,” my initial thought was,
THANK YOU, METHODIST CHURCH, FOR TEACHING ME THIS ONE.

When I was growing up in church, we stood when the choir director told us to stand, and we sat when he or she told us to sit. You were welcome to respond with “Amen” if the preacher said something especially memorable, but the women from the Wesley Circle would probably look at each other across the sanctuary and silently wonder why you felt the need to draw attention to yourself. So for me, the praise-and-worship time at my new school was a whole different deal. Lots of people stood and sang, just like I’d always known to do, but some raised their hands, some bowed their heads and turned their palms upward, and some simply sat in a posture of prayer. It wasn’t chaotic, and it wasn’t distracting; it was peaceful, and in the most unexpected way, it was comforting.

Well, it was comforting until they started singing a song called “Better Is One Day.” I’d never heard it before in my life, and the lyrics were an utter mystery to me. After a few seconds of fumbling around and trying to find my way, I finally just put my head down and tried to pray.

It might not have been a fresh move of the Spirit, but it worked just fine in an awkward-worship-moment pinch.

I told myself that the Lord
 
—and the Lard
 
—most certainly understood.

By the time we finished our lunch early in the afternoon, my nerves had settled and my optimism about the school year was on the upswing. The other teachers seemed super nice, and I was especially relieved to have hit it off with the other two foreign language teachers, who couldn’t have been more delightful. As I drove back to Baton Rouge, I wondered how in the world I’d found myself at a back-to-school convocation with a praise band and lifted hands and prayer time that could only be described as “fervent.” I’d never been in a work environment that was quite so, um,
charismatic
, and given the faith struggles of my past, I was tempted to think that Dr. Hughes had made a horrible mistake when he hired me. Clearly those people were way holier than I was. Plus, there had even been a moment when my new principal mentioned that we had all been “called” to work there, and instead of nodding my head like everybody else, all I could do was sit there and think,
I HAVE?

I mean,
calling
sounded pretty hard core, you know? I’d always thought that a call was for people who were planning to spend their lives pastoring a church or living in the mission field, so the idea that I could be called? As a teacher? To a place I’d only known about for a little over two months?

That just blew my mind.

When I got back to the house, I changed my clothes and spent the next two hours trying to will the clock to move faster so that David could get home from work already. We’d been married only a couple of months, but we’d developed a routine of sitting on our tiny back porch in the late afternoons and talking through whatever had happened during the day. Since I hadn’t started working and still didn’t really know anyone (HAVE I MENTIONED THAT?), it wasn’t unusual for my comments to center on how I’d watched
Waiting for Guffman
for the forty-first time
 
—or, on a superexciting day, I might share the details of a phone conversation
with Sister or the latest news from the Mississippi State football message boards.

But after convocation day, I had SOME THOUGHTS TO SHARE. In fact, I made an actual, physical list of what I considered the most pertinent details. And by the time David joined me on the porch late that afternoon, I was like a reporter waiting on her cue to go live from the newsroom.

David settled into the chair next to me with a look of genuine interest on his face.

“So,” he said. “How was it? Was it a good day? Did you enjoy yourself?”

I cut right to the chase.

“I’ll tell you what,” I answered, waving my list-o-topics in the air. “Those Baptists don’t mess around.”

The rest of in-service week passed without incident, though I quickly picked up on the fact that the tone of our convocation wasn’t a one-time deal. The high school faculty met in the library every morning, always with prayer time at the top of our agenda. It had been a long time since I’d been in an environment with such a strong emphasis on prayer, and while I probably would have expected it to make me uncomfortable to know the struggles and hurts and joys of people I’d known for a just few days, the effect was actually the exact opposite. It sounds like a Christian cliché, I know, but it was like we skipped right over the pleasantries and went straight to the heart. For an INFP like me, it was a relational dream come true. I wasn’t just learning names; I was hearing stories, and that made a new work environment so much less intimidating.

But speaking of names.

Somewhere around the fourth day of in-service, when the guidance counselor passed out copies of our class rolls, I immediately regretted that I’d never taken French. Many of the last names were ones that I’d heard of all my life, but a solid third were obviously waiting for me to butcher them. I asked a couple of other teachers if someone could help me with the pronunciations, and they both pointed me in the direction of Coach Delahoussaye, a lifelong south Louisianan with an accent that rivaled
Chef Justin Wilson for pure Cajun flavor. Coach D. sat patiently with me while I wrote out each name phonetically (Bourgeois
 
—BOUGE-wah, LeBlanc
 
—luh-BLAHN, etc.), and when the first day of school arrived, I was more nervous about saying everyone’s names correctly than I was about having to teach class.