Beginning to Say Goodbye

Tears started raining down her face as soon as the words left my mouth. She continued to cry as she tried to assure me that she understood why I had decided to go home. I squeezed her hand and promised her on my life that I would not lose touch. “You girls are so precious to me; you fill my heart in the hugest way. I promise you will stay there, in my heart; loved and cherished. I will save money; I will come back to visit.” She unwrapped the gift I pressed into her hand; a pair of porcelain angels which have adorned my apartment every Christmas for the past three years.

“The angel class!” She smiled through her tears.

 Ever since these remarkable girls came into my life, my heart has exploded in ten thousand ways. From the first semester, when they were eager freshmen, I called them my “angel class.” Countless memories have woven themselves through the fabric of these years. The girls crowding around my coffee table, eating jaozi. Girls in tears sharing about their past hurts or future fears. The girls cramming into my apartment for a movie. Girls sharing the microphone with me in both shabby and glitzy KTV rooms. The girls sitting with me in the crowded cafeteria week by week, sharing vegetable dishes and rice, pushing tidbits of food onto my plate with their chopsticks; “Sarah, have some.” The girls taking my heavy bag onto their own shoulders as I walk out of the classroom. The girls worrying about me:

 “Sarah, I was so glad to see you only carried one bag today. “

“Sarah, you should rest.”

 “Please take care of yourself.”

“Take my sweater; it’s cold outside.”

“When will your Mr. Right come?”

The girls sitting on my floor, trying on make-up for the first time. Girls making scented soap from the kit I carried to China all the way from America. The girls coming into the dorm hall exclaiming, “I heard your voice!” Girls talking, laughing on the sixth floor during my weekly visits to their dorm building. The girls speaking with other students at English Corner and discovering that their English really is as remarkable as I claimed. “Sarah, the others barely spoke! They just asked really simple questions! I realized, what you said about my English is true!”

Poland with the angel: birds of a feather....

During my second semester at this school, life was hazed with pain and stress as well as a relational emptiness resulting from my recent transition from my first campus in Nanchang. I had already taught and hung out with hundreds of students on this new campus, but had only discovered a handful of friendships that were real. I desperately needed a “heart gang.”

In the spring of 2011, I plopped my teaching bag on the desk in Room 304, and looked over a class full of girls with only three boys. I had no idea that I had walked into a relational treasure chest. Thus it began:  four semesters of teaching these students who embraced learning, cultivated creativity, and possessed precious hearts. Every week, as I walk through the dark, quiet campus after visiting the girls’ dorm, I find my heart bursting with the joy of knowing these wonderful “angels.”  And now, as this fifth semester of loving them begins to close, I must learn to say goodbye.

It will be very hard.

The angels as freshmen---after their first Easter egg hunt

 Poland and I at the cutest shop in China on the evening that we began to say goodbye.