Miss Townsend

It was 1958; the International Geophysical Year (IGY). The cold war was near its height. Khrushchev was the Premier of the Soviet Union. Eisenhower was President of the United States. The following year Khrushchev would visit the US and Iowa field of corn and nearly ruin the Soviet Union by demanding that wheat be plowed under and corn be planted instead. Three years later he would visit the United Nations and, taking off his shoe, would pound the podium shouting "We will bury you." (Since writing this, I have since discovered that this UN episode was not a real event. I don’t know how it got started, but it is a part of the legend of the Cold War.) It was a dramatic time. Over backyard fences we listened to our parents talking of nuclear war and satellites delivering atomic bombs. We watched the tiny dot of sputnik silently streaking across the night sky and listened to its beep-beep message to the radio world.

But for all the drama of the time, life was ordinary. I attended a parochial school located just a few feet from my back yard. My seventh-grade home room teacher was Miss Townsend. Now Miss Townsend probably should not have been a junior high teacher. Middle aged, single and not very worldly-wise, she was the target of much early-adolescent humor. One classmate, a gifted cartoonist, drew an unflattering caricature of her on the chalk board in her absence. Another time, during recess (in those days we had recess up through the eighth grade), we boys snuck back into the classroom and stuck a tack on her chair. We could not figure out her lack of response, until later, when we found the tack bent over under the impenetrable barrier of her girdle. Yet she never complained nor scolded, but she must have gone home at night and wept at our cruelty.

Now, looking back with a bit more insight, I remember her more as the one teacher who paid attention to me as an individual. The reason was grammar. I hated it. She tried every teaching method known to pedagogical science to ingrain into me parts of speech, gerunds and diagramming of sentences. She spent her breaks with me, trying to help me understand the verbs of being. She succeeded to some small degree. I know what a gerund is and I know what the verbs of being are; though I still don't know how to diagram a sentence.

The verbs of being are: I am, you are, she/he/it is.

The three verbs startled me one day when I was reading Exodus 3:14: God said to Moses, ‘I AM WHO I AM.’

I AM-what God says about himself. I exist, always did exist and always will exist. Therefore My Name is, I-AM.

My response to Him is: You are. You did, do and always will, be. I acknowledge Your existence by saying "You are."

Then I turn to the world and confess: "He is." We, together, as a part of the church confess this corporately to those whom He is saving. It is the Great Commission in two words-thesourcewellspring of all that motivates Christians to act in this world.

I AM, You are, He is; three two-word declarations but so pregnant withmeaning that all theology, all belief and all Christian action flows from them.

I AM, You are, He is-six words worthy of an eternity of meditation and action.

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