A Reflection on Teaching

eric-leonard I was a teacher once. I spent four years as a department head teaching graduate level students at a well known advertising and design school. A school that I myself graduated from many years ago. My students were both art directors and writers, but this reflection isn’t about advertising or design. This is a reflection on ministry.

I’m one of those people who have gone through life constantly seeking a ministry of some sort. Some way to serve. Some way to add to, or enhance the life of others. I’m still in that zone, and I suppose I always will be. At various times my passion might be for the homeless, the aged and infirm, those in their last hours of life, prisoners, and the pursuit of racial reconciliation. The list goes on.

Now that I’ve grown much older I’ve been blessed with the opportunity to look back on my path. A path full of wrong turns, dead ends, and occasional success. Perhaps one of my biggest mistakes was not understanding where my true ministry really was all along the way. At any given second we can be a light for someone in darkness, maybe even when we don’t realize it. Likewise, we can be an obstacle for someone even when we are trying to help. Our very life is a ministry for better or worse, so a serious commitment of discernment is needed if we hope to have a positive effect on those we meet on our journey.

All through my professional life I’ve always looked outside of the world I was involved with in hopes of finding a higher calling in the illusive “elsewhere,” while all along my service was needed right where I stood. Then, one day things fell together. The day I received a call asking if I would take over the advertising program at my old school. I had taught there off and on as an adjunct professor in evening classes over the years, but this time I was going all in as the head of a program.

Something I never told my students was the fact that I completely embraced my role as their teacher as a ministry. Never during my life has my mission been more clear to me than the four years I had the honor to serve young people who were trying to get started in their life and careers. I never once lost sight of how even the smallest words I chose could have a major impact on their lives. It was the only time in my life that I ever felt my vocation and my desire for mission were completely attached and in sync.

I will forever be tied to my past students, and I will always care where their life takes them as long as I am alive.

Unfortunately, it couldn’t last. Another thing I kept from my students and fellow faculty members was the great financial stress Pam and I were in during those days. The loss of my job as a high level creative at a major ad agency a few years earlier might have opened up the opportunity for me to teach for a living, but it also crushed us financially, and after four years at the school we were in a worse financial state than where we were before I started. It crushes me to know that the one job I ever had that felt right for me in every way, was the job I could not keep.

Eventually, an opportunity came to work full-time somewhere else, and even though this new job would pay less than a third of what I made before I was a teacher, it paid significantly more than the school would be able to pay me. To this day I’ve always been worried that both my students and the school thought I was leaving for other reasons. In fact, when I left, the school was poised to reinvent itself and become an even more exciting place. But my time had run out. I had to go back to a regular job.

Who knows if I’ll ever find that magic situation again where my desire to serve and my actual job can be one and the same. This is why I admire all teachers. It is a mostly thankless job with occasional high points and just as many stress points. But trust me when I tell you, all the good teachers out there do not do it for the money. Sure, they need money, and God knows how many of them might find themselves in difficult financial times due to their choice of vocation, but the money didn’t bring them there. Whether they know it or not they are the priests and bishops of a world that barely deserves them.