Every so often, a friend of mine from high school will post on Facebook a “Tuesday Toast” giving a shout out to someone who has had an impact on her in a positive way.
I love the idea. From time to time, I try to write old mentors and ministers to share with them some of the impact they have had on me. But I don’t get to do it as frequently as I’d like to. Incidentally, I don’t get to post on my blog as much as I’d like to either. So I’m going to try some Tuesday Toasts. It’ll be one way for me to bring something up each week and give a shout out to some of those people that, as a I look back on my journey until now, have had a major impact. And so here we go!
For today’s Tuesday Toast, I can think of no one better than my first great teacher: Mr. Tim Foster. Mr. Foster was the government and politics teacher my sophomore year of high school.
I remember walking through that busy second floor of DuPont Manual High School and I was overwhelmed. I had never been at a school so large. I had never been exposed to such a cross section of people either; students hailed from all parts of the city and came to Manual to pursue arts, sciences, theater. They came hoping to make an impact and get into the best schools in the country.
To say the least, I was quite out of place. Coming from Louisville’s south side, I had done enough to get by in middle school and had gotten into the most trouble without getting into serious consequences. Here I found myself in a flurry of ambition and talent and interests. The second floor of Manual was the epicenter, the hub of all this excitement. And so for the most part, I wandered around aimlessly, not exactly knowing where or how or when I would make my way through the flurry.
And there on the second floor, right next to the main stairwell, was Mr. Foster’s room. It was tucked around a little corner door, yet somehow there was a glow of warm affection radiating from within. I’d heard Mr. Foster was challenging. But there was just something about the room – you wanted to be in there. You wanted to be up for the challenge.
So I did it: I signed up for AP Government and Politics for my sophomore year. And I was not disappointed.
Mr. Foster taught like this was something that really mattered. At the same time he was spouting out the amendments to the constitution, he was giving us its real implications for the country we lived in. We memorized court cases and studied the branches of government. We argued over the points of government and individual responsibility. And all along Mr. Foster brought in a degree of realism – this really matters, this really affects how you will live and move and work in this country.
And more than that, Mr. Foster always connected with us beyond the classroom. He was always reminding us how lucky we were to be at the best school in the whole city. He was always mindful of schools around the state and even in our own city where we would not receive such a great gift.
He looked at you as if you were full of great potential. He reminded us that all our work was not for nothing. It would be a part of the great body of work that we could show to others so that we could say we had done something we were proud of.
Mr. Foster did not hold back. He was teaching a dicey subject in politics and he was teaching it to a wide spectrum of beliefs and political perspectives deeply held by a bunch of young, impressionable teenagers. He did so with great respect and tact. But there were times in our state and in our country where you couldn’t help but get angry. Mr. Foster did not keep it balled up but he let it out for us to discuss and mull over. He showed us that he was really impacted by this stuff.
And that was why he really believed in what he taught. He knew he was handing all this knowledge over to us so that one day we could resist such intolerable politics. We could live out the highest ideals of our country. I can almost here him now, baffled at some of our government policies – “If we really are committed to being a country of equality, how can we do things like this?”
Mr. Foster was the main reason I chose to study political science in college and he was a large part of the reason I first wanted to be a teacher. If he could have such an impact on me and teach me like he did, then I wanted to do that too. I wanted to teach people like this was something that really mattered.
Yet Mr. Foster’s impact on my life did not end there. Four years later, I found myself seated across Mr. Foster’s broad desk once more. He now a principal and I a college graduate, I came in hoping to re-connect and perhaps re-center myself again from his great teaching.
I told him I was entering the ministry and that I had been offered a scholarship from Wake Forest University. But there were some things holding me back. That day, Mr. Foster taught me once more.
He looked at me squarely, like I was a person just bursting with potential, like he had all those years before, and he said, “Chris, if you’ve got something that good right in front of you, you’ve gotta go.”
The lesson wasn’t over. “You know, I’ve tried a couple of these churches around here. My faith is something very personal for me. And I go into all these churches and they have all this nice stuff and there are all these nice people and programs and ya know, I think, ‘Would Jesus really want to hang out in all these places?” We both knew in our hearts that the answer was surely no. So I set out once more, hoping to connect what I learned with what really mattered, and hoping that I could turn the church into a place that Jesus would want to hang out.
Here’s to you, Mr. Foster. For teaching me the things that really matter, for helping me find my first passion, and, when that passion changed, for kindling the fire that would challenge me throughout seminary.
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