Thankful for public school

In one of my happiest memories, I was on the living room floor of my childhood home writing a long report about Martin Luther for my ninth grade English teacher, a determined feminist whose classroom smelled like suffocating florals. Outside my house, snow started to fall thick and fast through the trees, covering the ground. My report was late. My mother, who shampooed the rugs in the next room, allowed me to stay home from school on that last day before Thanksgiving vacation in order to finish my project. At three o’clock that afternoon—the last possible minute—she drove me frantically to the school so I could hand the report to my teacher with impunity.

Maybe when I look back at this memory I am supposed to see the hatching of a bad procrastination habit that has lingered on. But instead I always get caught up in the happiness of the day: my mother preparing for company, the falling snow, the bright burst of exertion before a night of celebration. That night, our house filled not with relatives but with friends from my parents’ workplace. They lined long tables in our living room, passing the feast and taking turns to express just one thing they felt grateful for.

Always fond of making a public speech, I remember turning the possible objects of gratitude over in my mind like bright jewels. I wanted to choose something no one else would choose, which immediately canceled out family, friends, a peaceful nation, and salvation. When it came my turn, I said, maybe impishly, “I’m thankful for public school.”

It was true enough. I loved public school in a way only a zealous teenage missionary can love public school. I saw our town’s school as a field white for harvest. In the suffocating floral classroom, I brought out my staunch, somewhat biblically informed opinions in full color—with varying degrees of clumsiness and sanctimony. When I look back at that time now, I wish I could tell myself to relax a little. But I leave my efforts, as I must, with God.

I chose to profess gratitude for public school that night because I usually just heard people complain about it. Public school wasn’t just an abstract institution to me; it was the place I spent my life and the place I served God.

In other years, when we spent Thanksgiving with extended family, the holiday also wore a missionary feel. Here was one day out of the year to gather with people who did not know the God you knew. Those verses come to mind:

“Do all things without grumbling or disputing; so that you will prove yourselves to be blameless and innocent, children of God above reproach in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, among whom you appear as lights in the world.”

Complaint is the mother tongue of people who do not know or give thanks to God. And as clumsy and self-promoting as my gratitude has been at times, I know this: I have God to thank for my thankfulness. It exists because He has done a miracle in me.