You Can’t Choose Your Grace

In the summer of 2009, I packed my belongings in a Toyota Tercel and headed for Chicago with dreams of being a comedy writer. As I rose to the top of my ten-person Second City class, I thought, “Surely my teachers recognize my brilliance. It’s only a matter of time until SNL calls.”

Sixteen years later, I’m finally an acclaimed director. At a recent awards ceremony, my work was named the best in its field for the second year in a row. I was surrounded by supportive friends and collaborators who were proud of me and my talented group of actors. This is what I hoped for back in my early 20s.

Except it’s not. This wasn’t the Emmys or the Oscars. It was a middle school One Act Play competition. The majority of my weekdays are spent with dozens of preteens, an age group I haven’t thought about since being one back in the ’90s. Three years ago, I applied to be a middle school theatre director, and only because I didn’t have enough experience to teach high school.

I’m incredibly grateful for my job. I see it as a gift, but it’s not what I would have chosen. I can’t really call it Plan B because of how many plans came before it: musical writer, fictional podcast producer, sketch comedy instructor, audio editor, improv troupe director. This was Plan J at best. My creative work never took off, no matter how many hours I poured into it.

After dozens of closed doors, I started thinking that maybe creative stuff is just a personal outlet. I pivoted to trying to find a day job, but with my psychology degree and undiagnosed ADHD, I couldn’t get a foothold in the corporate world. When our first child was born, it made sense for me to be a stay-at-home dad. Again, not what I would have chosen, but it was a relief to jump off the failure train.

In an inspirational movie, this would be the part where the artist “gets discovered.” But my life is not that movie. And the more people I talk to, it seems like the “movie version” of a career is the exception, not the rule. Most of us are in a very different field than our college majors and dreams of our 20s. These shifted roads are paved with disappointment, anxiety, and a feeling of wasted effort. For those who followed our dreams and found a dead end, what now?

Early in my “career,” I wrestled with how God fits in all this. I was drawn to the work of Andy Crouch, whose book Culture Making gave me a path forward. I furiously underlined his chapter on seeing work as a garden to be cultivated. I vigorously discussed his ideas with my bearded, pipe-smoking Christian friends and applied them to my creative work.

But I didn’t really get Crouch’s conclusion: “I believe the single best question for discerning our calling … is Where do you experience grace — divine multiplication that far exceeds your efforts?” I thought I understood it: keep doing what I want to do, on my terms, and something will finally take off. But it didn’t. Instead of reaping grace, my efforts always far exceeded any results, month after month, year after year.

My road to teaching was less “maybe I’d be amazing at this,” and more “maybe I won’t be bad at this, and summers would be nice.” My Chicago confidence was long gone, yet somehow I had further to fall. I found an opening at a Title 1 school, where teaching theatre was nearly impossible. A good day was not getting screamed at, a good week was not breaking up a fight. I anonymously wrote about one of my “wins,” and reading it now, it feels like a different person.

And yet, here I am, still a middle school theatre teacher (at a different school) and calling it grace. In this role, I’ve seen the isolated find belonging, the shy become confident, and the outcast honored. It’s a lot of work, but it’s satisfying. It turns out I enjoy hanging lights, writing curriculum, and seeing students take play so seriously. Contest awards are great, but more importantly, I’m regularly thanked by my principal, by parents, and even the students themselves. If adolescent gratitude isn’t a miracle, I don’t know what is.

Grace is a gift, and this job is a gift because I didn’t choose it. Grace isn’t grace if it’s earned, schemed, or bought. As Paul puts it, grace is “not from yourselves, it is the gift of God — not by works, so that no one can boast.” I can’t boast about first place finishes at a One Act Play contest. I don’t have a theatre degree and don’t understand all the terms that the judges use. But I’m fluent in failure and dead dreams, and what is soil but a graveyard? Failure has given me eyes to see gifts and a gratitude I couldn’t have conjured in my 20s.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that my recent “success” benefits middle school students. When Jesus saw needy crowds, Matthew says, “He had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.” How else would you describe today’s youth, whose current crisis has launched a thousand essays? The very next verse he says to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few.” Teachers have been fleeing the harvest (for very good reasons), so God raised up a worker. And because it was God, the harvest has been fruitful.

Would I choose it all again? I don’t know. I’d prefer to make more money, hang out with adults, and never hear “skibidi” again. But that’s not where the winds of grace are blowing, and I’m too tired to row against it. You don’t get to choose your grace, and if you could, it wouldn’t be a gift.