Once upon a time... A tale of the middle school years

Once upon a time there was a home school kid that loved his teacher. His teacher was his mom, and his mom had the top say in his life. She had raised him to read the word, pray, and worship daily. Respect your elders, clean up after yourself, you know…all of those wonderful things a good mom should teach. There was one mistake though; she loved the way his hair curled when it got long so when she cut his hair she would leave a couple of curls dangling down the back of his neck. Then it came time for our little home schooler to go into a public school because mom was having her fifth child and needed some help teaching them. Now our little lad who loved home schooling did not want to go to public school and hated the way kids judged other kids, he hated the way kids acted in general.
The first day he walked in to class was about two weeks after school had officially started and there was a math quiz. The poor lad looked at it and knew none of the material. Scared and not knowing what else to do, he took the quiz and with trembling hands gave it back to the teacher explaining, “I do not know any of this.” The teacher was a big man with a kind demeanor and he tried to reassure him, “It is ok, I want you to try it so that we can figure out where you are.” The child broke down crying and after a few moments collected himself and asked to go to the bathroom. He did not know where it was so the teacher asked the cool kid in the Vans and skate gear to help him find his way. Cool kid Vans man looked the home schooler over and then gave him this look like, “Are you from mars?”
I was that kid, and I learned vary quickly that even if your mom likes the way your hair curls, rat tails will just never be accepted as stylish. I cut the rat tail off and after a month of coming home everyday and crying, came to a revelation. My parents had made the decision that I was staying and crying was not going to change anything. From then on I took culture shock and turned it around on the culture itself. I began to build relationships with the kids and because it was such a small school I soon knew everyone’s name and had befriended each kid. I caught up in math and actually ended up teaching more math than our teacher. He was a little lost being a science geek that was forced to teach math because we could not afford another teacher. I began to pray and felt like I was supposed to start a bible study. I did and it started out with about 3 kids. Me, the one nerdy girl that had a crush on me, and the really smart girl that had like half the bible memorized but no comprehension of how to apply it. Anyways, we began to study the word during our lunch breaks. Most often it was mainly conversation based off of what we each had been learning in the past weeks. The conversation drew the popular girls in because they loved to talk about anything and everything. We had three of them get saved and they soon drew in the guys. I am telling you, you want more guys in your church, get the cute girls saved!
This growth continued all year and then summer came and most of the kids were like, “What do I do? We can’t stop just because school is.” So I invited them to my home church and we had about twenty of them begin carpooling in on Sundays. They were discipled on a deeper level then I could ever have done in a lunch break and we came back to school my 7th grade year with a solid remnant of disciples. Then it took off, we had about eighty out of the ninety kids in our class coming to Westside church. I was elected as President of the student body and began to lead even more formally with the faculty. It was outstanding, God did great things!
I am now the vice president of the student body in my high school and have helped raise up a bible study here as well. I have been under fire from our schools leadership and learning how to defend and further faith in a highly critical arena. I am believing for amazing breakthrough even still to come in the 3 quarters I have left before I am sent out into the next season. Which I am praying will be with you all at SPU.