God sees value in everyone: He knits us cell by cell

The administration at the high school where I teach not only seeks to support our strategies to meet No Child Left Behind's mandates, but it also strongly encourages the teachers and para-professionals to "come alongside" the students, to know them beyond their G.P.A. and school activities and to give them a safe place to hang. Times have certainly changed!

I don't remember any faculty member ever "coming alongside" me when I was in school, except maybe to whack me for being too friendly (just trying to liven up the place -- go figure!). My behavior was not excused because I was poor and did not have a father; there were no "Let's talk about how you feel" sessions. No one feared the ACLU or cared if she was nominated for Teacher of the Year, and they certainly never appreciated my motor-mouth as having potential to develop into a professional speaker. Not my teachers.

Their methods were consistently unempathetic -- they had one solution to my socializing and that was to pop me on the noggin for not following their rules. To make matters worse, when I got home I would be met by my, "Now you're in double-trouble," mother waiting to reinforce whatever totally unfair discipline I had received that day.

The difference between then and now is that we're seeing fewer and fewer involved parents. And that's one of the problems. For many of these kids no parent waits for them at home; for others the student is parenting the parent; and for yet others the parent is just too busy trying to make ends meet to get involved.

Our faculty meetings are less about teaching methodologies and more about critical issues involving the physical and psychological welfare of our students. Whereas drugs and alcohol used to be the prevailing way to cope with life's incipient marks of insecurity for these teenagers, "cutting" is now moving front-and-center. Some call it a fad; statistics prove it is much more than that in our community.

For many of our students their lives are filled with secret pain and cutting grooves in their skin gives them a sort of power -- the physical hurt can momentarily trump the emotional hurt and they are in control.

I remember the first time I confronted a second-year drama student about marks on her arm. She would hang in my classroom before school and sometimes between classes and soon she opened up about her life. The third year I had her she stopped cutting and we celebrated. After she graduated from high school she moved away and I didn't see her again for a year.

I ran into her at Walmart. Fresh marks were on her forearms, marks she tried to hide when she saw me. Her hidden pain had never gone away.

This past week in my drama class we began brainstorming about skits we could create to present to the middle schoolers to encourage them to not buy in to the world's answer to emotional pain.

How can we get those adolescents to understand that, in spite of all the negativity surrounding them ... parents who are absent or infused with their own behaviors of insecurity ... classmates who make fun of them because of their clothes or hair or unsocial mannerisms ... guilt over their physical ineptness or mental deficiency ... they are still valuable? They matter. And alcohol, drugs, sex and cutting are all temporary band-aids to mask their need to be valued, to have self worth.

After a spirited dialogue I polled my students.

"How many of you are not okay with yourselves right where you are?"

Out of the 26 in that class, all but one raised their hands. I watched them look around the room, stunned by what they saw. Classmates who were in the "in" crowd -- those with incredible talents and awards who had always been admired -- even their hands were raised.

Scripture says we are "fearfully and wonderfully made." Our crooked noses, our skinny calves, our bushy eyebrows -- God designed us as He wanted us to be. In our mother's wombs He knitted us cell by cell, different from everyone else, and yet we dare criticize His creation. "We're never good enough," we tell ourselves. Yet He knows otherwise. Someone once said that if God had a wallet our pictures would be in it.

Isn't that great? Our Heavenly Father loves us. He delights in us. The one answer for all of these hurting kids is the one thing the government says we're not allowed to share.

And so we educators stick our finger in the leaky dike, doing the best we can, desperately searching for some way to parent these "parent-less" young souls with listening ears and compassionate hearts, praying that they will somehow hear God's message of love and hope through our pathetically inept words.

Some things No Child Left Behind fails to take into consideration.