Georgie

Recently I’ve been meeting with a life coach to make plans for the next stage in my life, now that my children are all at school. Some things in my past have come up that still affect my confidence today, and among them are bad experiences at primary school.

The head of my primary school was a real tyrant. The school was very autocratic, ruled by fear, the worst place for a sensitive child like me. I was afraid every day there, and that environment effectively shaped the whole of my life.

One event in particular has stayed crystal clear in my memory and it sums up my experience of school.

When I was in Year Four a bag of clothes belonging to me was found in a classroom, not my class but an older year group’s. It ended up there because I’d left the bag at the house of a friend who came to Brownies with me and she had brought it into school, but I kept forgetting to go and pick it up. One day I was ordered to go to the classroom where the head was teaching and I suddenly remembered that my abandoned bag was in that same room. I was petrified but had no choice but to go.

I stepped into the classroom. She was teaching her Year Six pupils, but she didn’t take me to one side to talk to me – her practice was to discipline children in front of the whole class. Perhaps it saved her time on a busy day. And that’s what she did to me, chastised me harshly about the bag, in front of everyone, from behind her desk. I was completely humiliated.

I was a people-pleaser and already hated making mistakes, so this episode just confirmed to me that making mistakes was BAD. I pretty much tried to keep my head down and not raise it above the parapet during the rest of my schooling. As I’ve said, that environment shaped my whole life.

Over the years I’ve had a fair bit of prayer for these negative experiences at school. The prayer usually takes the form of re-visualizing the experience, while inviting Jesus into the memory, where he plays a supporting or comforting role. Despite these attempts, nothing has given me the closure I’ve sought for this episode on my life and its continuing effects on me.

Until last month, that is, when I attended the Healing Prayer School in Woodford Wells. One of the sessions required us to think back to a time in our past where we needed healing and to imagine Jesus with us. Once again, perhaps due to discussing it with the life coach, the memory of my humiliation by the head teacher surfaced - but having done this many times before I was feeling a bit cynical about the outcome.

I raised the scene again in my head thinking “Here we go again. God must be bored of this old chestnut. He must be thinking, ‘When will she forget it and move on!’”

But on this occasion it was different. This is how the scenario went this time:
I imagined entering the classroom where I was about to be told off. The head humiliated me as before, but then Jesus stepped in. He asked her to come out from behind her raised, over-sized desk. He told her that what she had done was wrong and she should apologise to me and the class for her actions. This she did (to my utter amazement). Then I skipped out of the room and waved to the class, my heart light and free. I was vindicated.

I didn’t imagine this on purpose – I placed Jesus in the scene, in prayer, and this is how it unfolded, to my own surprise.

It struck me that all this time, I had really wanted vindication, and God knew this; which is why however many times I tried to deal with the memory and the feelings of inadequacy it gave me, I just couldn’t move on. Jesus has dealt with all that. He simply stepped in and resolved this unhappy event in my life. Now, at last, I am free from its hold on my self esteem.