December: The Residue of a Life

Theme

Legacy

Quote

“The mirrour sheweth us not what we would leave behind, but what we have been.” The Mirrour Which Flatters Not

The Myth of Legacy

“The desire for immortality is the desire for the survival of a name.”  George Santayana

Legacy is a word I approach with skepticism, and that skepticism has been trained into me rather than merely felt. As a student and teacher of history, I have learned to be wary of stories that arrive already polished. Of narratives that present themselves as coherent, intentional, and morally resolved. Legacy, as it is most often invoked, is precisely that kind of story. It presumes scale. It assumes durability. It suggests that a life can be rendered legible to history in a way that resists erosion. The mirror, when placed before such claims, disrupts them almost immediately.

If the mirror has taught me anything this year, it is that legacy may be the most persistent form of self-deception left once other illusions have fallen away.

The mirror restores proportion. It does not enlarge the self, nor does it diminish it out of cynicism. It simply reveals scale. And scale, once seen clearly, becomes an ethical corrective. Most lives do not register historically. Most actions leave no archival trace. Most intentions dissolve long before they are remembered. The mirror does not treat this as tragedy. It treats it as truth.

I was reminded of this years ago when someone gave me a copy of Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. For the person who handed it to me, the book was not merely influential, it was formative. It had given them direction, a vocabulary for success, and a framework through which they understood both effort and reward. In that sense, the book “worked.” Yet as I read it, I felt an unease I could not immediately name. The claims felt too smooth, the authority too conveniently borrowed. It took little investigation to uncover what historians have long known: Hill never met Andrew Carnegie, despite building his entire mythology around that supposed mentorship. His ideas bore little resemblance to Carnegie’s own reflections on wealth, philanthropy, and responsibility.

My initial reaction was frustration at the deception itself. Frustration with the way Hill appropriated the success of others to fabricate a legacy for himself. But that reaction did not hold for long. What followed was something more complicated. This, after all, is how myths are made. The historian in me rejects such fabrication outright. The teacher in me, however, recognizes how stories, true or not, can orient behavior and provide coherence. And the part of me that understands religion as a human art form rather than a metaphysical system recognizes this pattern immediately. Humans have always told stories not simply to record facts, but to communicate meaning.

Not all myths are equal: some orient us toward responsibility, while others anesthetize us against it.

The mirror does not resolve this tension between truth and usefulness. It exposes it. It asks not whether a story inspires, but what it conceals. It does not deny that myths can shape lives; it questions who benefits from their circulation and at what cost. Legacy narratives often function not as moral reflections, but as instruments of anxiety management, particularly for those with power enough to worry about how history will judge them.

This becomes especially visible in religious contexts shaped by prosperity theology. Growing up, I encountered countless interpretive maneuvers designed to reconcile wealth with divine favor. Material success was framed as evidence of God’s blessing. Financial abundance became a proxy for righteousness. Legacy, in this framework, was measured in endowments, buildings, and estate plans. It was measured in the visible assurances that one’s life would continue to exert influence after death. The church itself became both beneficiary and validator of this narrative.

Yet the religious texts most often cited in these traditions resist such certainty. “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God” (Matthew 19:24, New Revised Standard Version). The sheer number of explanations offered to soften that statement, to render it metaphorical, symbolic, or contextually obsolete, reveals how uncomfortable we are with relinquishing control over judgment. Legacy, in this sense, becomes transactional. Wealth is exchanged for reassurance. Narrative is substituted for reckoning.

The mirror is unmoved by such transactions. It does not negotiate with intention. It does not reward generosity if generosity is deployed as insulation against judgment. It simply reflects. And what it reflects is uncomfortable: that legacy, as it is commonly imagined, is less about influence than about control. Control over how one is remembered, and more fundamentally, control over how one hopes to be judged.

When I turn the mirror toward myself, I am not spared this realization. The mirror resists my own attempts at narrative control just as firmly. It shows me as I am: incomplete, flawed, and fundamentally incapable of governing how others see me. Despite my efforts to write, to reflect, and to articulate meaning through this project and others like it, I cannot determine how I will be understood. I cannot curate my memory. I cannot secure my reputation. This is true now, while I am alive, and it will be even more so when there is no one left who remembers the living version of me at all.

In some small and honest way, this work, this sustained self-examination, this careful articulation, is itself an attempt at control. Not an attempt at legacy in the monumental sense, but a quieter hope that meaning might be stabilized long enough to be recognized. The mirror does not condemn that impulse. It simply refuses to flatter it. As Ecclesiastes reminds us, “Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh” (Ecclesiastes 12:12). Reflection does not grant permanence. It grants clarity.

Legacy, when stripped of myth, monument, and anxiety, becomes something less grand but more truthful. It is not a story we write about ourselves. It is a residue we leave behind: unintended, untraceable, and ultimately beyond our control. If this is what the mirror reveals about legacy, then what remains is not how large a life appears, but how it moves within the current of others.

Pebbles, Rivers, and the Ethics of Smallness

“It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.” Harry S. Truman

There is comfort in smallness. I do not experience that comfort as resignation or defeat, but as release. To see oneself as a pebble in the river of time rather than a boulder lodged against it is to be freed from a particular burden. The burden of needing to matter in ways that are publicly legible, competitively measured, or historically durable. The mirror does not diminish me by revealing my smallness; it steadies me by removing expectations I was never meant to carry.

Smallness, understood this way, is not the absence of ambition. It is the refusal of distortion.

When I no longer feel compelled to be “important,” I am released from comparison. Life ceases to be a contest in which meaning is awarded to the most visible, the most productive, or the most praised. I am no longer required to surveil myself constantly, measuring each decision against how it might read later be that on a résumé, in a biography, or in the imagined summary of a life. The mirror interrupts that internal accounting. It reminds me that a résumé is not a life, and that an obituary, especially one written in advance, often functions less as reflection than as performance.

This freedom allows a different kind of honesty to emerge. Radical honesty does not mean confession for its own sake. It means the ability to admit limits without apology, to acknowledge uncertainty without shame, and to live without the low-grade anxiety of recognition. I still have ambition. I still care about doing meaningful work. But I am no longer compelled to orient myself toward unrealistic milestones designed to justify my existence to an imagined audience. I do not need my life to read well at a distance.

The mirror, by restoring scale, makes that possible.

I saw this distinction clearly through a friend who was dying of cancer. Near the end of his life, he chose to write his own obituary. It was long, detailed, and expansive. It was an accounting of accomplishments, affiliations, and milestones. It read as a deliberate attempt to secure significance, to stabilize how he would be remembered. There was nothing dishonest in it, but there was something strained. It felt performative, shaped by the same pressures that had governed much of his public life.

After his death, something else happened. His friends went back through years of his Facebook posts—small, daily reflections, observations, jokes, frustrations, and moments of insight—and compiled them into a book, a daily devotional. It was not grand. It was not comprehensive. But it was unmistakably him. The voice was intact. The humor survived. The thoughtfulness remained. What emerged was not a monument, but a presence.

Placed side by side, the difference was striking. How he wanted to be remembered and how he was remembered were not the same thing. The obituary aimed at control. The book revealed continuity. One was intentional. The other was preserved by accident.

This is where the river matters.

The river of time does not honor intention. It does not preserve what we labor to stabilize. Instead, it weathers. It erodes. It smooths the sharp edges of performance and allows what is repeated, habitual, and unguarded to endure. What survives is not what we announce, but what we enact without thinking. The river keeps what fits its current.

The mirror prepares us for this truth by loosening our grip on authorship. It teaches that meaning disperses faster than we expect, and that this dispersal is not loss but transformation. To be a pebble is not to disappear; it is to be carried. Influence travels not because it is designed to, but because it is caught up in motion larger than itself.

Seen this way, smallness becomes an ethical stance. It resists the temptation to curate a life for later consumption. It privileges presence over projection, honesty over performance, and responsibility over recognition. It allows a person to act without constantly asking how those actions will be interpreted once the actor is gone.

The mirror does not ask me to abandon ambition. It asks me to abandon preoccupation with credit. Like Truman’s observation suggests, much becomes possible once the question of recognition is set aside. Work can be done for its own sake. Care can be extended without calculation. Words can be spoken without rehearsing how they might echo later.

In the end, the pebble does not decide where the river flows. It does not determine how long it will be carried or where it will come to rest. Its ethical task is simpler and more demanding: to be shaped honestly by the current it inhabits, and to allow that shaping to occur without resistance.

If legacy dissolves under the mirror’s gaze, smallness remains. It remains not as insignificance, but as fidelity to the scale at which life is actually lived.

Continuity Without Monuments

“What we give away is what we keep.” St. Francis of Assisi

When I think of my grandmother now, what rises first is not conflict, nor even grief. It is care. Ordinary, repeated, unremarkable care. I remember how she looked after a friend’s mother. I remember how she visited elderly, often widowed women from her church bringing them newspapers, taking them out for ice cream, washing and trimming their hair at her own home. These were not grand gestures. They were small human comforts, offered without fanfare, that kept people engaged with life and preserved their dignity.

The mirror teaches me to attend to this distinction. Continuity does not announce itself. It does not arrive as virtue or legacy. It forms quietly, through acts that seem too small to matter at the time they are given.

What my grandmother understood, long before I had language for it, was that near the end of life, people often want nothing more complicated than to be seen. Not evaluated. Not rescued. Simply remembered as still present in the world. When I would stop by her house unannounced with a pizza for us to share, I could tell that meant more to her than any gift I might have brought. Me showing up was the gift. Me sitting with her was the gift. Time, offered without agenda, carried more weight than anything wrapped or purchased.

She taught me this long before I was able to return it. And when it became my turn to care for her, to show up, to sit, to remain present without fixing, I did. Only now, looking back through the mirror, can I see how quietly important those moments were. They did not feel consequential at the time. They were simply what love looked like when stripped of performance.

The mirror clarifies how continuity actually forms. It does not move forward toward remembrance; it moves sideways through repetition. Influence travels not because it is intended to, but because it is enacted again and again until it becomes invisible. What my grandmother gave to others, she gave without thinking of how it would be remembered. And what I gave back to her emerged not as obligation, but as recognition. As recognition shaped by years of watching how care is practiced.

This becomes especially clear as I move through the practical work of executing her will and distributing her possessions. The material remnants of her life, few and modest as they are, are valued differently by the people who receive them. When I see a cup from the dollar store that I know she used every day, I do not see its monetary worth. I see the imprint of her life. I see mornings, routines, habits so consistent they left a mark deeper than ornament ever could.

As executor, I have been struck by how time spent with her alters how people assign value. Objects do not carry meaning evenly. They absorb it through proximity. Through use. Through presence. The mirror reveals that continuity is not housed in things themselves, but in the relationships that once gathered around them.

One moment, in particular, stays with me. While inventorying her china hutch, I found a rock and a piece of red glass. Around the rock was a small slip of paper from her sister. It read, simply: “Remember how we used to play house with rocks and glass.” These were the toys of her childhood. She had grown up in extreme poverty on a farm outside a small community in southwest Missouri. What she had was imagination and a dozen mostly older siblings. Nothing more.

That she kept these objects, not displayed, not explained, but quietly stored, tells me everything I need to know about continuity. They were not relics. They were reminders. Not of deprivation, but of resilience. Not of hardship, but of the capacity to make a life out of what is given. The mirror does not elevate these objects into symbols. It lets them remain what they are: evidence of a way of living that never required monuments.

What surprises me most in all of this is not sorrow, but gratitude. A quiet gratitude for the life she lived and the scale at which she lived it. Gratitude for care that did not seek recognition. For presence that did not demand return. For dignity preserved in others without ever being named as such.

Continuity, I am learning, does not depend on memory alone. Memory fades. Stories shift. What endures is valuation: the way time spent together reshapes how we see the world, how we treat others, how we show up without keeping score. The mirror reveals that this kind of influence does not belong to history. It belongs to life as it is actually lived.

There is no monument to this form of care. No inscription. No guarantee it will be remembered beyond those it touched directly. And yet, it moves forward all the same passed on not as legacy, but as practice. As showing up. As seeing. As small human comforts offered at precisely the scale where they matter most.

Religion as Mirror, Not a Promise

“Religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness.” Alfred North Whitehead

I grew up hearing a single refrain repeated whenever death entered the room: absence from the body is presence with the Lord. It was offered as comfort, as certainty, and often as closure. I do not believe in a literal heaven, nor in an afterlife beyond memory and influence. And yet that phrase has stayed with me. Not because I believe it to be true, but because I have come to understand what it was doing.

Religion, at its most functional, does not answer unanswerable questions. It supplies orientation. It gives people language when language fails. It offers forms—phrases, rituals, images—that allow grief to be held communally rather than privately endured. The mirror helps me see this clearly. It does not ask whether the promise is real. It asks what work the promise performs.

For many, that refrain transformed death into something to be celebrated rather than grieved. It replaced uncertainty with assurance and finality with reunion. I understand the appeal of that move. But for me, believing in something I experience as untrue, even when it is comforting, pulls attention away from the present and relocates meaning elsewhere. It risks orienting people toward a future they imagine rather than toward the life they are still living. In that sense, certainty becomes a kind of anesthetic. It dulls the demand of the moment.

The mirror resists this displacement. It does not forbid religious language, but it constrains its claims. When I think of religion as art, as an accumulated human response to suffering, wonder, and loss, it becomes most honest when it helps us understand how to live, not what comes next. Or, at the very least, when it helps us approach death with dignity rather than denial.

This distinction mattered deeply to me as my grandmother weakened. Near the end of her life, she began to see individuals: her sister, a young boy, and a young girl. I find the phenomenon itself fascinating. Do I believe their spirits literally appeared to her? No. That would require belief in a soul in a way I do not hold. But I do believe the experience was real to her, and that the comfort it provided was real as well.

The mirror allowed me to affirm that truth without translating it into belief.

What those visions revealed was not metaphysical reality, but relational reality. Her sister had held a place in her heart that no one else could occupy. That she appeared in my grandmother’s most vulnerable moments tells me everything about how her life had been oriented: toward connection, toward memory, toward care. The children, to my mind, functioned as angels in her symbolic world. That is, not as beings with wings, but as figures of gentleness, innocence, and protection. They were not evidence of heaven. They were expressions of how she made sense of comfort.

Religion, seen through the mirror, reflects the architecture of a person’s inner life. It shows us what they love, what they fear, and what they need in order to rest. It does not require assent in order to be honored. Meaning does not become false simply because it is symbolic.

This understanding has shaped how I chose to show up for her. When there was nothing I could say that would not feel either hollow or dishonest, what I had to offer was presence. Being there without judgment. Without expectation. Without translation. I could not share her language of faith, but I could share my time. I could show her that she mattered by spending time with her, by arriving unannounced with pizza or an ice cream cone, by sitting quietly, by listening, and by holding her hand until the end. 

And when it came to her rituals, I honored them not as beliefs I shared, but as practices that ordered her life. Every Sunday at eleven, sharing a meal as a family mattered to her. So I gave up my Sundays. I gave them as an act of fidelity. Presence, in that moment, meant entering her world without insisting it become mine.

The mirror clarifies this ethic. It asks me not to choose between truth and comfort, but to be faithful to presence. Truth without presence becomes cruelty. Comfort without presence becomes abstraction. Presence holds both without forcing resolution. It is what remains when belief falls silent and certainty proves inadequate.

Religion, at its best, does not promise what it cannot deliver. It reflects who we are when we are most alone. It offers forms sturdy enough to hold grief without pretending to explain it away. In that sense, religion as mirror does not lead us out of the world. It returns us to it. It returns us more attentive, more humane, and more willing to show up when meaning cannot be spoken.

A Year in the Mirror

“We do not learn from experience; we learn from reflecting on experience.” John Dewey

I began this year with an old maxim—Know thyself—and with a book that refused to flatter me. In January, the mirror felt confrontational. It promised exposure rather than insight, judgment rather than clarity. Even as I committed myself to sustained reflection, I suspected that what awaited me was mostly dissection: an inventory of flaws, habits, and failures laid bare under an unforgiving light. I worried that looking honestly would mean discovering only what was lacking, misshapen, or compromised.

That fear proved unfounded.

What the year revealed instead was not ease, but proportion. The mirror did not absolve me, but neither did it reduce me to my worst moments. Month by month, as I turned toward parts of my past I would have preferred to leave unexamined, I discovered something quieter and more enduring than judgment: understanding. There are still things I have not said and truths that remain too raw or too complex to set down in language. But I can see them now. The darker, hidden nooks are no longer amorphous or unnamed. They are visible for what they are. And that alone has altered my relationship to them.

Over time, my understanding of the mirror itself changed. I had assumed its purpose was exposure, to show me how ugly I might be if I looked closely enough. What I found instead was recognition. The mirror did not flatter me, but it also did not lie by omission. Alongside regret and responsibility, it reflected patience, care, resilience, and an ability to change. Looking honestly allowed me to see that I am not all bad after all. There are parts of me that are worth celebrating, not because they redeem the rest, but because they coexist with it.

There was a moment when this shift became unmistakable. When I publicly acknowledged my DWI, something fundamental changed. That experience had long ruled me through fear. Through fear of how others would see me, fear of what it said about my character, fear of being reduced to a single failure. Naming it did not erase its consequences, nor should it have. But it altered the relationship I had with it. I could see my actions clearly. I could take responsibility for them. And I could also see how I had changed in response. In that moment, the mirror ceased to be something I held at arm’s length. I stepped into it.

That is when reflection stopped being an exercise and became a posture.

Looking back across the year now, I can see how this practice carried me through moments I could not have anticipated. How it carried me through grief, through loss, through the slow and disorienting work of sorting what remains when a life ends. The mirror did not provide answers. It provided steadiness. It reminded me that understanding unfolds over time, that meaning emerges through attention, and that self-knowledge is less about resolution than about willingness to remain present with what is unresolved.

This is how my New Year’s resolution was fulfilled, not through completion, but through integration. Even if I am no longer writing under the banner of a formal resolution, this practice will stay with me. Reflection has become a primary way I experience the world. It always was, in some measure, but this year made it intentional. Disciplined. Honest. That change will endure.

The mirror places no grand demand on me going forward. It does not insist on continual confession or endless self-scrutiny. Its obligation is quieter and more exacting: to remain honest without becoming cruel, to resist both self-deception and self-erasure, and to continue attending to my life as it is actually lived. If there is growth to be had, it will come not from spectacle or self-judgment, but from fidelity to this practice: an ongoing commitment to character, to public and private virtue, and to presence in the world I inhabit.

I began this year wondering whether the mirror could ever show the whole truth. I end it knowing that it does not need to. It has shown me enough: enough to live more attentively, enough to carry forward what matters, and enough to set it down without regret.

The mirror no longer needs to be held.

It has already done its work.

November: The Throne of Glass

Theme:

Accepting the limits of one’s own understanding and transforming pride from defense into gratitude.

Quote:

“Pride buildeth a throne of glass, which the mirrour of truth shatters to dust.” 

— The Mirrour Which Flatters Not

October: Bearing One Another’s Burdens

Theme: Compassion and Empathy

Quote: 

"To see oneself in another’s pain is the mirrour of true humanity."

— Jean Puget de La Serre, The Mirrour Which Flatters Not

Through the Mirrour 

When I walk into my classroom each morning, I am not alone. The walls are crowded with faces—hundreds of photographs from the past two decades, arranged without design but forming, together, a tapestry of memory. There are smiles and smirks, caps and gowns, babies balanced on hips, even the occasional awkward teenage pose. At first glance, it might look like a collage of ordinary school snapshots. But to me, each face carries a story—stories of perseverance, struggle, failure, resilience, and sometimes loss.

The wall is not static; it shifts depending on where my eyes fall. Some mornings, pride rises as I look at the students who fought their way through difficult programs, who went on to college or trade school, or who built families of their own. Other days bring sorrow when my gaze lands on the students who vanished—pulled away by poverty, incarceration, addiction, or despair. And then there are the names that haunt me: students who never reached adulthood, whose lives ended suddenly in accidents, overdoses, or violence. The wall holds all of them together—triumph and tragedy side by side, successes that inspire and losses that ache.

I often see new students wander the room, tracing the wall with their eyes until they land on a familiar face. A brother, a cousin, sometimes even a parent looks back at them from the collage. It is a moment of recognition: they are not alone. They are part of a story that stretches across time, a story that includes both hardship and survival. I invite them to add their own face to that story, not as decoration, but as testimony that they, too, belong.

In this way, the wall has become my mirror. It reflects back not just the history of my students but also my own vocation as their teacher. Jean Puget de La Serre wrote, “To see oneself in another’s pain is the mirrour of true humanity.” The wall does exactly that. It confronts me with the truth that compassion is not abstract. It is written into the lives of real young people, and it demands that I see myself in them and them in me.

Psychologist Carl Rogers once said, “When someone really hears you without passing judgment on you, without trying to take responsibility for you, without trying to mold you, it feels damn good.” That is what the wall whispers to me: that the first work of compassion is not to fix, but to witness—to see others clearly, without judgment, and to acknowledge their place in the human story.

And yet, the wall also poses a question I cannot escape: What happens to this story when I am gone? Will the faces remain, tended by another? Will the story continue to grow, reshaped in ways I cannot imagine? Or will the photographs eventually come down, leaving only faint marks of tape on the paint? I do not know. But I know this: the wall is more than paper. It is testimony to the truth La Serre described—that humanity is revealed most clearly when we dare to see ourselves in the lives of others.

In the Classroom

To teach in an at-risk program is to live in contradiction. Every day I step into a room that holds both extraordinary possibility and deep fragility. Some of my students arrive carrying burdens no teenager should bear: poverty, fractured families, trauma, addiction, instability. Others are already parents themselves, balancing schoolwork with diapers and midnight feedings. Some are defiant; others are broken. Each one brings a story that does not fit neatly into a transcript.

The work is never simple. Some days end in joy—watching a student earn a credit, complete a program, or simply show up after weeks of absence. Other days end in heartbreak when a student vanishes, swallowed up by the same forces that brought them to me in the first place. As the French philosopher Simone Weil once wrote, “Compassion consists in paying attention.” This, I have found, is the core of teaching at-risk youth: not to rescue every student, but to pay attention—to notice, to accompany, to honor their humanity even when the outcome is uncertain.

One memory stands out above the rest: Micayla. She was a senior in my program, quick to smile and laugh, the kind of student who made the classroom lighter just by being there. The memory I carry most vividly is not of a lesson or exam, but of a Thanksgiving meal we prepared as a class.

We had planned to cook everything in a single morning: thirty pounds of potatoes, trays of biscuits, turkeys that needed cleaning and roasting. It was a daunting task, especially in the cramped heat of a teacher’s lounge kitchen. Students drifted in and out, lending a hand and then retreating to take breaks. But Micayla stayed. From the moment she arrived, potato peeler in hand, until the last dish was washed, she never left my side.

I remember the smell of onions sizzling, the clatter of pans, the blur of faces moving in and out of the room. And there was Micayla, focused, cheerful, content with the simple work of peeling and mashing, of turning raw ingredients into a meal for our little community. When at last the others had gone and it was just the two of us, I thanked her. But she surprised me by thanking me—for letting her peel potatoes, for letting her take out the trash, for letting her belong to something. She told me it reminded her of cooking with her father.

It was such a small moment, easy to overlook amid the chaos of the day. Only later, after her untimely death, did I realize how deeply it mattered. For her, that morning was not about food but about connection. For me, it became a parable of compassion: sometimes the greatest gift we can give is simply to create a space where someone feels they belong.

Henri Nouwen wrote, “Compassion asks us to go where it hurts, to enter into the places of pain, to share in brokenness, fear, confusion, and anguish.” In that kitchen, I glimpsed what that means. I did not save Micayla, and I could not change the tragedy that followed. But for one morning, I was invited into her world. I shared in her joy, her memory of her father, her desire to belong. And that, too, is compassion: not fixing, but being fully present.

I no longer measure success only by graduation rates or credits earned. For many of my students, survival itself is success. As Viktor Frankl reminded us, “Those who have a ‘why’ to live, can bear with almost any ‘how.’” For Micayla, the “why” was belonging. For others, it may be a child, a dream of work, a hope for stability. My task is not to determine that meaning for them, but to help them discover it, even briefly, within the fragile space of a classroom.

Conditional Redemption

When I began my dissertation, I did not set out to write about redemption. I wanted to understand the lived experiences of students and educators in the Missouri Option Program, which offers an alternative pathway to graduation. But as the interviews unfolded, a pattern emerged. Over and over, I heard about students who had been given another chance—and the conditions they had to meet in order to claim it. Slowly, the language of conditional redemption took shape.

The phrase unsettled me at first. Redemption, in my mind, carried echoes of grace, a gift given freely. Yet here I was hearing stories that spoke of opportunity wrapped in requirements: attend classes, pass the HiSET, maintain compliance with school expectations. A second chance, yes—but never an unconditional one. For some students, the conditions aligned with their abilities and circumstances, and they walked through the open door. For others, the door was just out of reach, closed not because they lacked desire, but because life collapsed around them before they could step through.

Using a constructivist grounded theory approach meant I could not separate myself from this process. I was not merely recording data; I was part of the meaning-making. And the truth is, conditional redemption mirrored my own teaching experience. I had long felt its pull: the elation when a student seized the opportunity, the ache when another fell short, the humility of realizing compassion does not guarantee transformation.

Theologians have wrestled with this tension for centuries. Augustine insisted that grace is always prior, always unearned: “For what have we that we did not receive? But if we received it, why do we boast as if it were not given to us?” Yet even Augustine knew that grace does not work without cooperation; there is always a human response required. Later, Dietrich Bonhoeffer drew a sharp distinction between “cheap grace” and “costly grace.” Cheap grace requires nothing of us, while costly grace demands our very lives. “Costly grace,” he wrote, “is the call of Jesus Christ at which the disciple leaves his nets and follows him.” In their different ways, both thinkers remind us that redemption, divine or human, is never without condition.

In psychology, too, we find echoes of this truth. Resilience research shows that recovery from trauma is always possible, but it depends on both inner resources and external supports. The opportunity must be present, but so must the capacity to meet it. Compassion alone cannot guarantee success; the conditions of a student’s life must align with their will to change.

The Missouri Option Program embodies this paradox. It is a structure of mercy, offering students who have failed in the traditional system a new path. But it is also a structure of demand, requiring them to rise to meet its standards. In that way, it is not unlike my classroom wall: a collage of second chances, some realized, some lost, each shaped by the fragile intersection of opportunity and response.

Conditional redemption, then, is not just an academic theory. It is the lived reality of compassion in practice. It is the truth that grace must be offered, even knowing it may not be received. It is the willingness to open the door, again and again, even if not every student will walk through.

Constructing Empathy

When I chose constructivist grounded theory, I thought of it as a research method. What I discovered was that it was also a religious discipline: a way of learning to see others not as subjects to be studied but as partners in meaning. In constructivist work, the researcher is not a detached observer gathering objective data. Instead, both participant and researcher shape the theory together. The voices of those I interviewed did not simply add to my knowledge; they changed me.

This was, in its own way, an act of empathy. Empathy is not sentimentality. It is not “feeling sorry” for someone. Carl Rogers defined it as “to perceive the internal frame of reference of another with accuracy, and with the emotional components and meanings which pertain thereto, as if one were the person.” My participants invited me into their frames of reference. Their struggles and triumphs did not remain “theirs” alone—they became part of my own story. And the theory we constructed together bore the fingerprints of us both.

Martin Buber called this kind of encounter the I–Thou relationship. In his view, most of life is lived in I–It terms: people are objects to be used, managed, or understood. But in rare, transformative moments, we meet one another as Thou—not as objects, but as beings whose presence calls us to responsibility. “When I confront a human being as my Thou,” Buber wrote, “and speak the basic word I–Thou to him, then he is no thing among things… but is rather being itself.” That was my experience in these interviews. They were not data points; they were persons, encountered as Thou. And in meeting them as such, I was changed.

The classroom mirrors this same truth. My wall of faces is not mine alone. It is not a project I built by myself; it is a story co-created by the students who added their photographs and, in doing so, left their imprint on the room. Teaching at-risk students has taught me that empathy is not about delivering knowledge but about constructing a shared story.

Paulo Freire, the great Brazilian educator, insisted that “Dialogue cannot exist… in the absence of a profound love for the world and for people.” In his view, education is not a one-way transfer of information but a dialogue in which both teacher and student are transformed. That is what constructivist grounded theory asked of me as a researcher, and it is what my classroom demands of me as a teacher: to create spaces where dialogue, not domination, shapes the story.

To construct empathy is to risk being changed. It means admitting that the boundary between teacher and student, researcher and participant, is porous. Their story becomes part of mine, and mine becomes part of theirs. Together, we create meaning that neither of us could have found alone.

Lessons in Compassion, Lessons in Self

Compassion has a cost. That is one of the truths I have learned over twenty years with at-risk youth. To care deeply for students whose lives are fragile is to carry their stories inside you, long after they leave your classroom. Some days that weight is joy—when a former student messages me to say they’ve found work, or when I see a picture of them holding their newborn child. Other days, the weight is unbearable: the phone call that another young life has ended in overdose, suicide, or accident. The wall of faces I live with is not only a tapestry of triumphs but also a cemetery of absences.

Early in my career, I believed compassion meant never letting a student fall. If I worked harder, gave more, stayed longer, surely I could carry everyone across the line. But that illusion eventually broke. I learned the bitter truth that not every student can be saved, and not every story will end in success. The Stoic philosopher Epictetus wrote, “Make the best use of what is in your power, and take the rest as it happens.” Compassion does not mean omnipotence; it means doing what is within my power—teaching, listening, accompanying—and then releasing what I cannot control.

The challenge is not only external but internal. There are days when compassion feels like weakness, when empathy drains me to the point of exhaustion. In those moments, I wrestle with the temptation to harden myself, to pull back, to protect my own heart. Yet as Brené Brown reminds us, “Vulnerability is the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, empathy, and creativity.” To remain compassionate is to remain vulnerable—to risk being wounded again, to open myself to grief alongside joy. Without vulnerability, there can be no authentic compassion.

Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk, captured this paradox well when he wrote, “Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy.” In other words, compassion is not contingent on outcome. It is not offered only to those who succeed or only to those who thank me. It is a posture, a way of being in the world. And it is humbling, because it constantly confronts me with my own limits.

Perhaps the hardest lesson has been learning compassion for myself. I am not a traditional teacher, and I often feel the shadow of imposter syndrome among my peers. I lack their credentials, their neat success stories, their polished classrooms. But here, surrounded by the faces on my wall, I am reminded that perfection is not the point. Presence is. To show up, again and again, even when the stories end in grief—that is the deeper work.

The faces have taught me that compassion is not about erasing pain but about walking beside it. It is about sharing in brokenness, even when the outcome is beyond my control. It is costly, humbling, and at times almost unbearable. And yet, it is the only way I know to live this vocation with integrity.

Carrying Compassion Forward 

I often find myself staring at the wall of faces and wondering what will happen when I am gone. Will another teacher continue to add to it, reshaping it in their own way? Will the wall slowly fade, the photographs curling and falling, until only faint tape marks remain? I cannot know. But I do know that the work I have given my life to must be larger than a wall. Its endurance will be measured not in photographs but in the structures of compassion I have built—the programs, the opportunities, the second chances—that can outlive me.

During my dissertation defense, my advisor observed that the phrase conditional redemption carries unmistakable religious overtones. He was right. I hear in those words not only the voices of my participants but also the echoes of the gospel stories. What comes to mind most strongly is the Fifth Station of the Cross, where Simon of Cyrene is pressed into service to carry Christ’s burden. Simon did not erase the suffering, nor did he change the destination. But for a moment, he stepped in, shouldered the weight, and bore it forward.

That image captures the heart of my work with at-risk youth. I cannot save every student. I cannot erase their burdens or predetermine their endings. But I can bear with them, for a time, the load they carry. I can offer presence, patience, and persistence—carrying what I can, even knowing it will not always be enough. Compassion in this sense is costly. It means entering into the suffering of another, knowing I will carry the ache of it with me long after they are gone.

This is what separates compassion from sentiment. Sentiment wants happy endings; compassion accepts the brokenness of reality and still chooses to stand alongside it. Dietrich Bonhoeffer called this “costly grace”—a grace that does not come cheaply, but demands something of us. In the classroom, costly grace means offering another chance, even knowing some students will not take it. It means holding space for belonging, even when the world outside denies it. It means peeling potatoes with a student one morning and, years later, carrying the grief of her absence.

I no longer think of compassion as mine to possess. It is not a trophy, a feeling, or a strategy. It is a pattern—a way of being—that must be set in motion again and again. Students have shaped that pattern with me; colleagues have carried it alongside me; research participants have co-constructed it into language I can now name. The wall reminds me daily that this story was never mine alone.

When future students walk into this room, whether my face remains on the wall or not, I hope they sense what countless others have felt: that their lives matter, that they belong to a larger story, that redemption—though conditional—is always possible. I cannot control how the story will change when I am gone. But I trust it will continue, because compassion is never the possession of one teacher, one program, or one wall. It is a pattern that, once set in motion, cannot be undone.

September: The Conditions of Fortitude

Theme: Fortitude 

Quote: 

"The mirrour is unbroken by storms, as the soul must be steadfast amidst trials." 

— Jean Puget de La Serre, The Mirrour Which Flatters Not

Introduction

Fortitude has always stood at the crossroads of philosophy and faith, recognized as one of the cardinal virtues—those pillars of moral life upon which human flourishing is built. Its history stretches from the dialogues of Plato to the treatises of Aquinas, from the stoic schools of Athens to the councils of the medieval church, and into the shifting moral vocabularies of modernity.

In the Greek tradition, fortitude—andreia—was seen as the courage that enables a person to act rightly in the face of fear. Plato, in The Republic, defined courage as the steadfast preservation of belief about what is truly to be feared or not to be feared: “Courage may be defined as the preservation of the belief which has been inculcated by the law through education about what things and sorts of things are to be feared” (Plato, Republic 430b). Courage, then, was not reckless daring, but endurance rooted in knowledge and discipline.

Aristotle refined this understanding, locating fortitude in the mean between cowardice and rashness. In his Nicomachean Ethics, he wrote: “The brave man is the one who faces and fears the right things and with the right aim, in the right way and at the right time, and who feels confident under the corresponding conditions” (III.7, 1115b). For Aristotle, fortitude was not brute strength or blind daring, but measured endurance—the will to act well in the most testing of circumstances, especially when facing death.

The Stoics expanded fortitude beyond the battlefield to the domain of daily life. For them, adversity itself became the training ground of virtue. Epictetus counseled: “Difficulties are things that show a person what they are” (Discourses I.24). Seneca, likewise, turned hardship into a forge for the soul: “No man is more unhappy than he who never faces adversity. For he is not permitted to prove himself” (On Providence, IV.3). For the Stoics, fortitude was less about conquering external enemies and more about conquering the storms within—the passions, fears, and attachments that threatened reason’s sovereignty.

With the Christian tradition, fortitude was reinterpreted through the lens of faith and martyrdom. Augustine wrote that true fortitude was not simply human willpower but the steadfast clinging to God: “Fortitude is love bearing all things readily for the sake of God” (On the Morals of the Catholic Church, XV). What mattered was not merely enduring for the sake of honor or reputation, but enduring for the sake of love. The Christian martyrs embodied this transformation: their courage was sanctified as witness (martyria) to truth and faith.

The medieval scholastics systematized this virtue within their moral theology. Thomas Aquinas described fortitude as that which enables the soul to stand firm against the gravest fears, especially death: “Fortitude strengthens a man to endure and repel all difficulties, by which the mind is hindered from following the moral good” (Summa Theologica II–II, Q.123, a.2). For Aquinas, fortitude was not only about enduring external dangers but also resisting internal despair, and its highest expression was martyrdom—the refusal to forsake the good, even under the threat of death.

As the centuries passed, the meaning of fortitude shifted with cultural change. In the Renaissance and Enlightenment, it became entwined with ideals of honor, self-discipline, and civic responsibility. Machiavelli praised fortitude (virtù) as a quality of rulers who must navigate fortune’s storms with boldness and resolve. Later, Enlightenment thinkers like Immanuel Kant emphasized fortitude as moral strength in the face of duty: “Morality is not properly the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness” (Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, 1785). Fortitude here became endurance in obedience to moral law, even against one’s inclinations.

In the modern era, the word has thinned into “resilience” or “grit”—concepts prized in psychology and education. Angela Duckworth defines grit as “perseverance and passion for long-term goals” (Grit, 2016). Viktor Frankl, writing from the crucible of the Holocaust, spoke of fortitude in terms of meaning: “When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves” (Man’s Search for Meaning, 1946). Even today, the ancient insight holds: fortitude is not the absence of suffering, but the ability to live through suffering without surrendering to despair.

Through these changing lenses—Greek courage, Stoic endurance, Christian martyrdom, Enlightenment duty, modern resilience—fortitude remains the mirror that does not break in the storm. It is the strength to face fear, loss, and trial with endurance. It is not the virtue that removes suffering, but the one that allows us to survive it, and perhaps even to be changed by it.

Literature Review

Burnout is not simply fatigue. It is the collapse of energy and meaning, the slow erosion of the will to continue. For me, the breaking point came after years of uninterrupted study. I had entered graduate school in 2016, completed my master’s degree, then pressed on into a specialist’s degree, and finally enrolled in my doctorate. By the time I stalled in my dissertation, I had been in school for six straight years. The passion that had carried me forward—my love of learning, of classroom discussion, of discovery—had been ground down into exhaustion.

On October 3, 2022, I wrote these words in my journal:

“Life is full of difficult choices. For several months, I've been struggling with what to do about graduate school. I love being in school. I love going to class, engaging in discussions, and learning about topics that had hitherto been unbeknownst to me. As much as I love being a student, however, I have not been a successful doctoral candidate. My writing has stalled, I can't find my passion, and I haven't made meaningful progress for a long time. Additionally, I no longer can envision myself as an administrator. So, it comes to this, my journey, at least for now, needs to be set aside. I cannot say that I will never pick it up again, but I know that to continue at this junction is futile.”

In that same entry, I tried to soften the wound with gratitude, offering thanks to those who had sustained me through the years: my wife who had read countless drafts, my brother who had provided distractions when I needed them, my parents whose love steadied me, my colleagues who kept me inspired, my friends who forgave my absence. I wrote:

“I do not consider this a failure, as tempting as it sounds to my self-deprecating nature, because when I look back on this journey, I've accomplished so much more than I set out to. I finished a Master's degree, a Specialist's degree, my doctoral student period, and I passed comps. I finished everything but my dissertation and, at least right now, that is enough.”

These words were both true and untrue. They were the truth of a man who could not continue, who needed to lay the burden down. But they were also the protective rationalizations of someone who had not yet found peace with incompletion. At the time, I described myself as “at peace.” In reality, I was exhausted.

Burnout is often described as a threefold collapse: emotional exhaustion, cynicism or detachment, and reduced efficacy. For me, it was the first and the last. I still loved learning, still loved my field, but I had nothing left to give. And what little I did attempt seemed futile, as though the well had run dry. COVID compounded this by shrinking the community around me and amplifying the loneliness of the work. Eventually, the cost of continuing felt heavier than the cost of quitting.

This was the literature of my life at that moment: exhaustion, stalled passion, a waning vision of myself as an administrator, and the temptation to rename withdrawal as peace. I did not yet know that fortitude sometimes requires laying a burden down in order to take it up again later.

Findings

In my dissertation research on Missouri’s alternative education programs, I developed a grounded theory I came to call Conditional Redemption. The theory rests on a simple but profound observation: redemption is never automatic. For students who have fallen behind or been pushed aside by traditional schooling, the chance to graduate, to reclaim dignity, or to find success depends upon a set of fragile but essential conditions—supportive mentors, flexible structures, financial resources, and above all, a community that believes in the possibility of change. Without these conditions, redemption remains out of reach. With them, even the most at-risk student can discover a path forward.

What I did not realize as I was conducting interviews, coding transcripts, and developing categories, was that I myself was living under the same law of Conditional Redemption. My decision to leave the doctorate had left my own story unfinished. For three semesters, I lived in the absence, until finally the silence of incompletion grew heavier than the work itself. Something in me clicked: I had to return.

But the conditions were not simple. The university required me to pay for the semesters I had missed—three thousand dollars that I did not have. As a public school teacher living paycheck to paycheck, that sum was daunting. I went to the bank, refinanced my truck, and wrote the check. It was an act of sacrifice that cleared the way for me to reenter.

Time was another condition. The deadline had not shifted during my absence, and I returned to the same ticking clock. There would be no extensions, no grace period. I accepted this and began again.

Then came the rediscovery of process. On a Tuesday night, I logged into the Dissertation Help Line, where we used the Pomodoro Technique: short bursts of focused writing punctuated by breaks. In that one session, I wrote more than I had in the three previous years. The tap was opened, and words poured forth. The literature review, once a desert, grew into more than one hundred pages. Years of reading and note-taking finally found their voice.

These were the conditions of my redemption: financial sacrifice, structural accountability, new processes of work, and communal support. Without them, I would have remained stuck in burnout. With them, I found momentum and, eventually, completion. By the time I defended, my dissertation had grown to over three hundred pages, culminating in the very theory that had described both my students’ lives and my own: Conditional Redemption.

Discussion

The classical tradition treats fortitude as a virtue that sustains the human soul in the midst of trial. Plato tied it to knowledge, Aristotle to measured courage, the Stoics to endurance, and the Christians to martyrdom. Across all these traditions, one truth stands out: fortitude is not a moment but a posture, not a singular achievement but a way of living. To be steadfast in storms is not to survive one tempest and claim victory, but to endure wave after wave with one’s soul unbroken.

My own experience has led me to see fortitude through the lens of Conditional Redemption. The two are not separate but intertwined. Fortitude, in its classical sense, is the inner strength to continue when quitting feels easier. But fortitude does not grow in isolation. It requires conditions—structures of accountability, communities of support, and even sacrifices that press the soul toward resilience. In this sense, fortitude is both conditional and redemptive: conditional in that it cannot be sustained without context, and redemptive in that it transforms suffering into endurance and incompletion into new beginnings.

This recognition reframes fortitude not as a static possession but as a dynamic process. It is not a medal to be worn but a verb to be lived. Fortitude happens when I refinance a truck to reenter a program I had abandoned. It happens when I log onto a Tuesday night Help Line and write more in an hour than I had written in years. It happens when my brother takes up the task of reading drafts, or when colleagues and participants across Missouri step forward to lend their voices to my study. Fortitude is not the final defense of a dissertation. Fortitude is the Tuesday night, the refinancing, the quiet return.

And this insight mirrors what I found in my grounded theory. Conditional Redemption describes how at-risk students in Missouri’s alternative education programs are not “saved” by entering such programs automatically. Their redemption—finishing high school, reclaiming dignity, stepping into a future—is conditional. It depends on structures, mentors, resources, and resilience. Without these, redemption falters. With them, even those who had once been written off can discover strength they did not know they had.

Is this not the same with fortitude? The Stoics taught that adversity is the forge of the soul. Christians taught that martyrdom was the highest act of endurance. But in my own life, I see how the very conditions that seemed like barriers—financial strain, lost time, burnout—were also the conditions that called forth fortitude. To return after leaving, to endure after breaking, is to embody a virtue that does not erase suffering but transforms it into persistence.

Fortitude, then, is not about success. It is not measured by the letters after one’s name, the trophies in one’s case, or the visible outcomes of labor. Fortitude is about courage—the courage to begin again, the courage to walk forward when the horizon is unclear, the courage to hold fast when meaning seems thin. Fortitude is not the applause at the end of the race; it is the unseen steps along the way. It is, in every sense, a verb.

In that light, Conditional Redemption becomes a way of naming fortitude in action. It is the framework that reveals how we endure—step by step, condition by condition, act by act. It tells us that redemption is never guaranteed, but always possible, if the conditions align and if the will to keep going does not collapse. To live fortitude, then, is to live in the possibility of redemption, to believe that incompletion is not the end, and to accept that what matters most is not the final defense but the daily courage to press forward.

Thus, fortitude is not a static virtue I possess but a way of moving through the world. It is the verb by which I return, by which I endure, by which I am redeemed again and again.

Conclusion

Fortitude has followed me as both an idea and an experience. In the classical world, it was counted among the virtues that sustained the just life. In the Christian tradition, it became sanctified as the strength to hold to the good even under threat of death. In my own life, it revealed itself not in moments of triumph, but in the long process of leaving and returning, breaking and continuing, pausing and beginning again.

My theory of Conditional Redemption gave me language to see this more clearly. Just as students in alternative education programs require certain supports, conditions, and structures to endure, so too did I. I could not have completed my dissertation without the network of people who believed in me—family, friends, colleagues, and faculty. Fortitude was not mine alone; it was ours, a shared resilience made possible through community.

Fortitude, then, is not an ornament of the soul but a way of walking through life. It is not about success or perfection, but about the courage to return, the will to endure, the patience to march forward even when the end seems far away. It is not a possession but a practice. It is, as I have come to see, a verb.

La Serre wrote that “The mirrour is unbroken by storms, as the soul must be steadfast amidst trials.” In my own mirror, I see not an unbroken man, but a man who has been broken and returned. The cracks remain, but the glass still reflects. That is the true shape of fortitude—not a pristine perfection, but a resilience that endures.

As I look forward, I know the storms will come again. But I also know this: the mirror can withstand them. Fortitude will not remove the trials of life, but it will carry me through them. And in that endurance, there is redemption.

August: An Abundance of Gratitude

Theme: Gratitude 

Quote: 

"Gratitude is the fairest adornment of the soul; the mirrour’s light shineth brighter when held with thankful hands." — Jean Puget de La Serre, The Mirrour Which Flatters Not

The Foundation

Every house begins with a foundation. Mine was poured before I could even name it, in the choices my parents made when they were still little more than kids themselves. They were young — my mom still in high school, my dad working. We lived with my grandparents in those first years, and though I don’t remember that time, I’ve heard the stories from my parents’ friends: teenagers stopping by after school, seeing me as the baby in their circle. I was part of their coming-of-age in a way I didn’t understand until much later.

The psychology of being raised by teen parents is layered and often misunderstood. It means watching your parents grow up as you do, learning their own roles as adults at a pace set by necessity, not choice. Developmental psychologists sometimes speak of “parallel maturation” — the idea that a parent and child may both be navigating formative transitions at the same time, each shaping the other’s experience. As author Anna Quindlen observed in Loud and Clear (2004), “We grow into our responsibilities, just as responsibilities grow into us.” For many families, this strain can crack the concrete before it ever sets.

But somehow, they made it work. My mom balanced schoolwork with the work of caring for me, crossing the high school graduation stage not just with a diploma but with a child she was already raising. My dad took on full-time work, the kind of steady labor that kept food on the table and the lights on. I imagine they were exhausted more often than not, yet they kept building.

Brick by brick, they created something lasting. They bought a house. My mom went to college, working toward her degree in education and eventually becoming a teacher. My brother was born when I was four, and the foundation stretched to make room for more. There are whole rooms in their story I’ve never entered — details of their struggle, their marriage, their private fears. But I know enough to be grateful. As Irish poet John O’Donohue writes in Anam Ċara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom (1997), “The foundations of your belonging are laid down in the shelter of others.”

I remember the good things vividly: learning to read at home, my grandpa coming in for lunch and watching television with me, my dad coaching my soccer, baseball, and football teams. These moments were not decorative trim — they were the very concrete that kept the structure of my childhood solid.

Even now, decades later, my parents remain my rock. They have been there for every major turning point, steady in both crisis and celebration. I’m a teacher in no small part because of them — because my foundation was poured with both sacrifice and love. And when I look in the mirror of gratitude, I see not just myself, but the hands that laid the first stones.

The Frame

If my parents laid the foundation of my life, Robert built the frame. To say that the church was fundamental to my early development doesn’t even begin to unpack that period of my life. And if the church was so important, then it goes without saying that my youth pastor, Robert, was its embodiment.

I was raised in the Southern Baptist church, and those formative years shaped not only my faith but my sense of identity. I saw myself through the lens of the Great Commission — as someone called to evangelize, to live in a way that would bring others to Christ. It gave me a sense of mission and belonging, but it also strained my relationships with people outside the church. I measured friendships against the urgency of salvation, often placing conversion over connection. My sexual identity was equally shaped by that environment. I was dedicated to abstinence, not simply as a rule but as a defining part of my character. In my mind, these convictions were marks of moral integrity, proof that I was living as I was meant to live.

Robert was the living embodiment of that world for me. He was young, intelligent, and passionate in a way that made faith feel alive. From my first day in the youth group in sixth grade, he saw something in me worth investing in. We went on mission trips together — Kansas City, Birmingham, Phoenix, Fort Worth. He took me to my first concert, a Waterdeep show that felt like stepping into a world where music and spirit intertwined. He gave me opportunities to lead, in both teaching and worship roles, at an age when most people wouldn’t have trusted a teenager with that kind of responsibility.

Robert was my first true mentor. For nearly six years — from middle school through half of my senior year — he was a central figure in my development. He didn’t just teach me scripture; he taught me how to think about it, question it, and apply it. He gave me a framework of confidence and purpose that became part of my internal structure. As Carl Jung observed, “The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed” (Modern Man in Search of a Soul, 1933). In those years, Robert’s influence transformed me.

And then, suddenly, it ended. He was pushed out of my church and community in December 2000, halfway through my senior year. His departure was abrupt, and I was left to navigate the rest of that formative season without the person who had shaped so much of it. In the years since, I have rarely seen him and spoken to him less. It was a kind of death — not of the body, but of a living connection — and in some ways, it carried a Jungian weight. Losing Robert’s presence meant confronting the loss of guidance itself, and the understanding that the structures we rely on can be dismantled without warning.

Gratitude, I have learned, changes with time. The things I cared about then — the zeal of belief, the sense of certainty, the strict moral boundaries — are not the same things I am grateful for now. Back then, I might have said I was thankful for being “set apart” from the world. Now, I am grateful for the leadership opportunities Robert gave me, the trust he placed in me, and the ways he encouraged me to think critically — even if that critical thinking eventually led me away from the faith we shared. As David Whyte writes in Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words (2014), “Gratitude arises from paying attention, from being awake in the presence of everything that lives within and without us.” Time has shifted my attention, and with it, my gratitude.

I am an atheist today, and I see my Southern Baptist upbringing in context — as both a source of deep personal formation and of ideas I’ve since let go. I am grateful to the people of my church, and to Robert, for the sincerity of their care and the investment they made in me. I also recognize the narrowness of the frame they helped construct, one I would later remodel entirely. But the fact remains: without Robert, the house my parents began could not have taken shape. And perhaps that is one of the strange gifts of gratitude — it can honor the role someone played in your life without having to agree with the blueprint they were working from.

The Walls and Rooms

If my parents poured the foundation and Robert built the frame, then these people built the rooms I live in — spaces that gave shape to my inner life, each with its own character and purpose. They are gone now, but their presence is still felt in the way certain corners of my life are lit, the way certain doors open, the way the walls hold steady when the wind picks up.

It’s hard to talk about these people without getting emotional. The influence of those now gone can take on a mythic quality, as though in death we canonize them. But behind the myth are the real people — flawed, human, and still profoundly important. Their absence leaves rooms that are quiet now, but never empty.

Grandpa Ernie died when he was 65, and I was 20. He didn’t live to see me struggling toward the man I am today, and I often wonder what he would say to me now. Our differences were real — in politics, in temperament, in how we saw the world — but the love would still be strong. He taught me the value of steady work and the dignity of public service, having given twenty-five years to the water and electric department. His life was proof of Kahlil Gibran’s words in The Prophet (1923): “Work is love made visible.”

Dr. Glenn Colthorp, my college mentor, built a study with wide windows in my mind. He believed in my capacity to think critically and to contribute meaningfully, long before I had much evidence of my own potential. He asked questions that made me stretch, encouraged ideas that felt fragile, and never made me feel foolish for not knowing something. I never got to tell him that I finished my doctorate — a sentence that even now catches in my throat. As long as I live in that room he built, I will carry the ache of not having been able to show him the finished work.

Robin Hicklin and Tammy Burch, my first teaching mentors, built the first classroom I ever truly stepped into as a teacher. Robin died recently, a man in his fifties, still young in my mind. Tammy died of cancer, also far too soon. They showed me what it meant to hold high expectations while also holding space for struggle. They taught me that teaching is not simply about content, but about seeing each student as a whole person. Their absence still feels like missing walls — the kind that once defined a space and made it safe, now replaced with open air.

Fr. Steve Wilson built a chapel in my inner architecture. As a spiritual mentor, he invited me to wrestle with big questions, to understand that faith could be both deeply held and deeply examined. He died during COVID, also in his fifties, with years of plans still laid out before him. I expected to have him for decades more. His absence left the chapel quiet, but the light still streams in through its stained-glass windows. As Rainer Maria Rilke wrote in Letters to a Young Poet (1929), “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves.”

I thought I had more time with each of them. I expected their rooms to be lived in for years or decades longer. Each loss touches a nerve still very much alive in me, because these are not just the builders of my house — they are part of its load-bearing structure. Gratitude here is threaded with grief. As Joan Didion wrote in The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), “Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.” And when we do reach it, we find the rooms they built are still standing — rooms we return to, again and again, even if only in memory.

The Windows and Doors

Every house needs openings. Windows to let in light. Doors to step through into new spaces. In my life, these have been the countless people who, whether for years or for a fleeting moment, changed my perspective or opened a path I had not seen before.

Not all influence comes from those closest to us. Some comes from a single act of kindness, a well-timed question, or an unexpected opportunity. These are the people who became windows — showing me a broader view of the world, letting in the kind of light that makes you see old rooms differently. Others acted as doors — standing at the threshold of a new chapter, encouraging me to walk through, sometimes holding the door open, sometimes giving a gentle push.

I could try to list them all, but the truth is I would fail. Not because I don’t remember them, but because the list is always growing. Gratitude here is more like sunlight than a ledger — it spreads, it shifts, it catches on unexpected corners. As Brother David Steindl-Rast writes in Gratefulness, the Heart of Prayer (1984), “The root of joy is gratefulness… It is not joy that makes us grateful; it is gratitude that makes us joyful.” These windows and doors have taught me that joy comes not just from what I have, but from the ways I’ve been allowed to move and see.

There are teachers who never had the title “mentor” but left me better equipped to teach. Friends who appeared only briefly but gave me a lesson I’m still unpacking years later. Strangers whose generosity reminded me that goodness is not as rare as cynicism would have me believe. Students whose resilience reframed my understanding of my own.

These openings — whether grand bay windows or narrow side doors — remind me that my house is not sealed off from the world. It is part of a larger neighborhood of connection, and I am both a recipient and, I hope, a giver of light and passage. I am grateful not just for the rooms I live in, but for the ways in and out, the chances to look beyond my own walls and invite others into the shelter I’ve been given.

A Yearlong Journey

This year has been about looking in the mirror and tracing the lines of who I am back to their sources — humility in February, truth in March, wisdom in July — each month adding a different layer to the reflection. August, with its focus on abundance, feels like the moment to step back and see the whole structure. I am not the sole architect of my life. The house I inhabit was built by many hands, each leaving a mark that cannot be erased.

As a teacher, I seek to honor all of the people who built me by investing and building in others. Every lesson plan, every after-school conversation, every word of encouragement to a student standing at a crossroads is part of that work. It is my way of extending the architecture — adding new rooms, reinforcing old beams, repairing cracks where the structure has been tested.

Gratitude is not just backward-looking; it is forward-moving. It asks not only, Who gave to me? but also, What will I give to others? The people who shaped me — my parents, mentors, friends, and even those I no longer share beliefs with — did not invest in me expecting repayment. They built because it was in them to build. Now, it is in me.

In this way, abundance becomes a legacy. The walls and rooms others built for me will stand longer if I open my own windows, if I build for others to inhabit. And when I am gone, I hope my name will be one of many in someone else’s incomplete list — a reminder that they, too, were never building alone.