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In An Instant…Part Seventeen
Chapter Thirteen:
I could pretend it wasn’t hard, the way others look at me with pity, and the way they act as if somehow what happened to me suddenly means I lost my ability to teach. I protected those kids that day, in that moment I saw the face of my niece, and those kids came family. If someone was going to die at the hands of a messed up kid, it wasn’t going to be them. But that isn’t what they see, they just see the wheelchair and somehow I become a liability. It isn’t fair none of this is, but then again the good Lord never promised that everything would always be smooth sailing, he did promise he’d be there through the storms.
Andrea and Chloe have been my strength through this, they have helped me in more ways than I could begin to describe, but it is the Lord whose there at night when I wake up from a nightmare, a memory from that day. Sometimes I think I can still smell the gunfire. I’m alive though and all my students are as well, that’s definitely a God thing, and I’m slowly fighting my way back to independence, gaining a little more each day. I’ve finally gained enough strength to push myself in a manual wheelchair, a small victory perhaps, and I do tire easily, but small victories matter too, perhaps sometimes even more than the bigger ones.
I get frustrated at what I can’t do of course, if all I lost at the hands of a kid…
