Jacqui's Blog

Being a missionary is more than feeding the hungry  Serving people is more than healing the sick. The hands and feet of Jesus are not reserved solely for the physically impoverished. It might not be the most glamorous, but this is the mission work we are doing here in Kenya.

This is one of Jacqui's experiences from last week:

Today,

the freshmen had their Unit 1 Math Test. I spent the morning and part of the afternoon grading it. When Josh came in for study hall, he asked me to grade his test so he could know his score. He told me he was scared that he failed. I graded it and found out that he got 40%. There’s something you need to know about Josh. He tries so hard to do well in school, but he doesn’t always understand everything. I’ve been helping him a lot with math and he knows how to do most things, but he’s very unsure. He told me last night that his mom told him to study for 4 hours for this test, and I told him that that should help him do well. When I showed him what he got, his face dropped. I could tell that he was feeling really down and unhappy with himself. I wasn’t sure what to say to him, so I just prayed that I would have the words to say, but I was putting it off. I continued grading and he moved to the computer. After a few minutes, he asked me to look at his screen and written in a word document was “Sorry God for I have sinned. Sorry miss jacque for I have sinned.” I was shocked. At first, I almost yelled out “WHAT,” but then I calmly asked him to come and sit by me so that we could have a talk. ”Oh no…” he said. I took a piece of paper and I wrote on top of it “Things that Josh is good at” and underlined it. I explained to him that school and grades are very important, but they are not the most important thing in life. We started thinking of what to put under the list and it looked something like this:

Things that Josh is good at:

- biology
- bible
- typing
- soccer
- basketball
- volleyball
- making new friends
- being positive
- helping people
- singings
- saxophone
- working hard
- trying his best

There was more on the list but I can’t remember everything. ”What a LONG list!” I said, “Now let’s make another one.” He then told me three things to put on this list.

Things that Josh is not so good at:

- Math
- English
- Health

And that is all he could think of. I showed him how big the first list was compared to the second one. At the bottom of the page I wrote: And God LOVES him (no matter what).

I told him to keep this piece of paper and look at it whenever he’s feeling down. I also told him that as long as he tries his best, I will be proud of him. Josh is such an incredible kid. It broke my heart to see him thinking he had sinned by failing a math test.