The Sunday School Teacher
佚名 / Anonymous
Miss Swan couldn’t take being a Sunday school teacher any longer. Not for another Sunday! This handful of disrespectful teenagers snapped their gums during prayer time and read magazines during Bible study. But most awful of all, at prayer request they asked the Lord to increase their weekly allowances!
“I have had it with you. I quit!” she screamed at the students. “Cool,” Rick said nodding in approval. He was the rudest kid she’d ever met.
It took two months to find a new replacement for that Sunday school class. The pastor escorted Miss Betty Ray in to meet the pseudo-angelic-looking group. New in town, she hadn’t heard of their reputation for chasing off teachers. By the look of her pink dress, one size too small, and her bad blonde bleaded hair, the students obviously felt they had an easy job.
Soon bets were taken as to how long Miss Betty would last.
Betty introduced herself, stating that she recently came from the South. She certainly looked like a southern belles who wore outdated clothes and whose beauty had peaked a decade earlier, only she didn’t know it yet. Snickers rippled in the room as she rummaged through the huge shoulder bag she carried as a purse.
“Have any of you ever been out of state?” she asked in a friendly tone. A few hands went up.
“Anyone travel beyond five hundred miles?” One hand went up as the snickering diminished.
“Anyone visited outside the country?” No hands went up now. The silent teens were puzzled. What did this have to do with anything? Was she using psychology on them, or was she just plain clueless?
Finally, Betty’s bony hand struck oil what she had been searching for in her handbag. Pulling up a long tube, she unrolled a map of the world. “What else do you have in there? Lunch?” someone cracked.
Betty smiled lightly and answered, “Cookies for later.” “Cool,” Rick quipped.
Then she pointed with a long fingernail to an odd-shaped continent. “I was born here,” she tapped with her finger. “And I lived here until I was about your age.”
Everyone craned their neck to seep where it was.
“Is that Texas?” someone sitting in the back asked. “Not even close. It is India.” Her eyes twinkled with joy.
“How did you get way over there to be born?” Betty laughed. “My parents were missionaries there, and that was where my mother was when I came into the world.”
“Cool!” Rick leaned back in his chair duly impressed. Betty fumbled again in her purse, this time pulling out a handful of old wrinkled pictures along with a tin of chocolate chip cookies. They passed the pictures around, viewing each with great interest. Dark faces stared up from the photos, frozen in time. The kids studied them as they bit into the sweets.
“You don’t have to be a missionary—everyone can do something in this world to help another,” Miss Betty said. The hour quickly slid by as she told them her stories about faraway places and what the people were like there and how they lived.
“Wow, this is as exciting as TV!” one young girl told her.
Sunday after Sunday, Betty came to the class, tying her lessons to their everyday lives. She told the teens how they could make a difference right now. The students grew to love her, bleached blonde hair and all. The more they liked her, the lovelier she became.