Leadership through Stories

I have always found a peace by being by myself. It is only now that I am at the University of Texas that I realize how important it is to me to be alone, slow down, and just examine my life. I do this often with the aid of a good book. I had thought that reading was just a relaxing hobby until I came to college. Now, fifty thousand people that seem to be going as crazy as little kids going for candy at a Halloween party are surrounding me. A lot of the time, it seems like I am living in an ant colony and everybody is moving around frantically like little ants, but I cannot understand the whole picture. I am supposed to be able to keep my head screwed on straight and focus on my priorities in the midst of seeming anarchy and bedlam. I have been thrown into the deep end of the pool, and now it is the time to find out if I will sink or swim. However, I find that I strangely relish my newfound freedom. In this do-or-die context, my life has seemed to come into perspective and the things that are profoundly important have come to the forefront of my life. I have found that the only way to stay sane and true to myself is to never lose sight of my passion and ultimate goal.

It seems like everything in my life has been building up to realization of that goal. Curiously, I was reminded of that goal recently when the University’s motto “You Shall Know the Truth and the Truth Shall Set You Free” John 8:32[i] was brought to my attention. Childhood memories were stirred. I remembered a hilarious little boy in my fourth grade class, Quentin Lewis. He was a black minister’s son who used to always say in a preacher's kind of voice, “The truth shall set you free!” It was quite comical because he used it as the perpetual solution to any problem. It is only now that I am more mature that I realize the profound truth of that statement, and its relevance to my life. It is true on the Biblical level: the truth that God’s forgiveness sets us free from the consequences of our sins; it is true in the context of everyday wisdom: honesty is always the best policy and frees us from guilt; it is also true about ourselves: accepting our particular gifts and personality frees us to truly be ourselves. My truth and goal is to serve God and honor him with whatever gifts and passions He has given me.

Kids at VBS

Finally, I will let you in on my grand passion: my love of stories. I aim to share my love of stories with the world, and thus become a free, fulfilled, and peaceful person. By sharing my love of stories I will be a leader and make the world a better place because stories help build our spirit, give information, teach how to write and think better, record history, build identities, open our minds to the world, and make us better persons. The only question is: how do I achieve this? For me the solution is to be a teacher. John Maxwell said, “The first step to leadership is servanthood”[ii]; teaching is certainly a serving profession. I hope to communicate my love of stories by completing my education in a correlating field such as English or Education, by joining activities that will allow be to share my love, and by eventually traveling the world as a teacher in some capacity. Some of the steps to my goal I have already begun, some are just over the horizon, and some may take a lifetime to complete.

First, I will give you a little bit of background about myself, outlining how I came to this point in the vision for my future. Looking back over my life, I see that the things I am most successful at, not surprisingly, stem from my love of stories. For example, I am good with children because I am ridiculously enthusiastic about keeping them occupied with miscellaneous tales of all sorts. I noticed this about myself when I went up to Wyoming to teach Vacation Bible School. It did not seem like work for me to tell the kids stories from the Bible and make real life applications through funny stories. I felt as if I was genuinely myself and completely natural with the kids. All my energy and goofiness and creativity finally had a productive outlet in relating seemingly academic and philosophical biblical stories to their lives. I also saw this quality in myself in Mexico where our church did vacation Bible school. Once again I felt a powerful pull to tell those children stories. It felt incredibly good to have found my niche there in Mexico, helping translate for the pastors, singing songs, and just having fun playing children’s games like Duck Duck Goose and Red Rover. Even right here, at home, I have tons of opportunities to tell stories: as a babysitter telling scary stories late at night, regaling my buddies with good books I have read, or just helping children with their homework. Examination of my past made me recognize that I am naturally gifted with a passion for stories. Whatever my future may be, in order to be happy I need to funnel that passion into my life.

Also, I do not think anyone could understand what I want to do with my life and how I want to do it, if they did not know about the people that have profoundly impacted me by what they have taught me. I will begin with my grandmother, my Meme. She is the first person that taught me to love the written word and that passion has definitely stayed with me through the thick and thin. I remember the countless days we have spent together, lazily devouring hundreds of pages with a true spirit of book lust. She was a teacher for well over thirty years and it is from her I first came to have a high opinion of the teaching profession. Additionally, my youth minister, Paul, is the one that opened my eyes to how important a part of my life my faith should play. He was and is a living example of everything he preaches and I respect him immensely. It is because of his widening effect on my heart that I opened myself up to the unglamorous profession of teaching and came to respect servant hood. If I do indeed become a teacher, I will strive to follow his loving and just example. I learned from him how much respect has to do with learning and that living by example is the strongest teaching tool. Finally, I will report on who helped me make sense of the connection between my passion for stories and my faith. It was Christ. I realized that he is pretty much the ultimate storyteller; he constantly used parables to teach. He did this because he knew several things: stories can be made to apply to relevant situations even as times, situations, and problems change, stories plant a seed in the listener that can be realized far in the future, stories allow a person to make progressive statements that would otherwise get them into trouble, and stories also make teachings easier to remember and apply. As a result of these fine people, I now am on the path to achieving my dreams.

Here at the University of Texas there are several activities I can do right now in order to help me accomplish my goal. I have become involved with Phi Lamb, a Christian sorority, which helps underprivileged children with their homework. This program is called Smart Start, and even though I just started to volunteer I can already see that this activity will be a real character builder. Another way for me to serve is through the Hispanic sister church of my church, Hyde Park Baptist Church. I plan to help take care of the children there during their Sunday school. Thus, I would simultaneously be improving my language skills, telling stories, and growing in my faith. In addition, this summer there is also an opportunity for Spanish students to go to Spain and teach students there. I also have the option of becoming involved with the Peace Corp immediately after college, which is very interesting to me. These activities would give me a through background and base of knowledge as an international teacher later on.

Teacher teaching

I want to travel far, geographically and intellectually, so I will be able to lead others to follow my example. I want to always keep on learning because as John Maxwell wrote “We cannot lead anyone else further than we have been ourselves.”[iii] I plan to do this by getting a degree in English, learning foreign languages, and traveling the world as a teacher to help others gain a wider view on life. I am already on my way to sharing my passion with the world as a student at the University of Texas. The university has an impressive English department as well as stellar foreign language departments and teaching sections. I want to learn as much as I can about each of these fields so that I can go abroad and teach. I want to go all over the world: Europe, Africa, South America, everywhere. My aim is to see all that I possibly can and meaningfully touch the lives of people in these diverse regions with my love of stories. I want to share with them the knowledge of other cultures through education. Because learning helps lower the level of hatred internationally by increasing knowledge about different cultures one person at a time. Simply put, people aren’t as afraid of what they are familiar with.

Currently, I am in English and Spanish classes and am on my way to developing my skills in those areas. However, I am very reluctant to begin taking education classes because I am afraid of becoming trapped behind a desk in the school of some suburban classroom right after college. I hope I can overcome my fear because I can see myself loving working with children or young adults overseas. It’s been really hard coming to peace with being a “teacher.” I’m smart, I’m ambitious, and I was brought up with a certain lifestyle. I often battle with myself because it seems like I’m underselling myself in a mediocre profession because as the culture perpetuates “those who can’t do teach.” However, I am smarter than that stereotype and can think for myself just as a want to help other people think for themselves. I’m not some rigid self-righteous teacher or a naïve, ignorant idealist. I’m a college student at a large, liberal university who is struggling with a calling to a vocation that isn’t glamorous or potentially financially rewarding. But I know, deep down in my heart, that I am meant to do things differently than everybody else. I am supposed to go to different places and learn different things. It is like Charles Kingsley wisely said “We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about.”[iv] I am enthusiastic about stories and teaching and know if I remain in the business school and become a CPA I will suffocate under my own dreams.

As far as the market goes for my future profession, there is a great demand in other countries for good English teachers. It would also be wonderful to be able to teach at a Christian school because I would be able teach stories hand in hand with my faith. I hope through stories I could teach my students more than just a language but also dignity and respect. I hope I could teach my students the important concept Atticus taught Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird, "You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view...until you climb into his skin and walk around in it." [v] Stories have certainly helped me to learn how to empathize like this. In fact, my own personality has been deeply shaped by my love of stories; it has given me the strength to rise above whatever situations I have found myself in. Stories have made me realize that there is a big, big world out there and other people have faced struggles just as heartbreaking as any of mine, have survived, and have been all the better for it. I want to give others that same strength. The attached video link shows a good example of this. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5677289125499842069&q=teach+reading&hl=en

In the conclusion of my paper and my life, I can see myself as an old lady. I’ll be cheerful and outspoken and wonderfully eccentric. I will have traveled the world. I’ll have a library and a garden. I’ll have great stories for my little grandchildren. Maybe I will even have written a book. Thus, after I make my travels, I would be able to record them and share my experiences with the world. I will be unabashedly myself and satisfied with life. I hope I will be like Baroness Karen Blixon, a great storyteller, who wondered as she left her home in Africa, "If I know a song of Africa, of the Giraffe, and the African new moon lying on her back, of the ploughs in the fields, and the sweaty faces of the coffee-pickers, does Africa know a song of me?"[vi] I do not necessarily need to intimately know Africa, but I do want to leave my mark on the word through teaching children with stories and learning about foreign cultures. I believe God can show His love through the love of other people; I want to be one of those people in the life of my students.

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