Matching Tracksuits

A student hands a teacher a 9 millimeter hollow-point bullet on the way out of the classroom with the simple comment that he “found it on the floor in the classroom.” Within a few minutes, people from the district office and the police department start pouring into the building. All the eighth-grade students are ushered back to their homerooms. Each homeroom takes its students to their lockers, instructs them to take all their materials with them, and walk through one of the the weapon detectors that district personnel and the sheriff’s office rotates throughout the schools. 

In the meantime, the kids sit for an hour in my homeroom, waiting for our turn, talking about what’s going on.

“Mr. Scott, is it true someone found a bullet?” a girl asks.

“Can we just jump out of the window if we have to?” another girl asks.

“I’m low-key worried, Mr. Scott,” a boy says.

I tell them that there’s nothing to be scared of, that we’re taking these precautions to make sure we’re safe. “If this were a situation with immediate dangers,” I reassure them, “I would not be this relaxed.”

In the meantime, a charismatic young man begins reassuring everyone that Jesus will protect them. He’s doing it half in jest, half in seriousness. I tell him to bring it down a level. He does for a little while, then decides he wants to read Bible verses to everyone. I call him over to my desk.

“I know what you’re going to say!” he reassures me.

“Just come on over here, please.”

He steps to my desk, and I explain: “Not everyone in here is Christian.”

He smiles: “Got it.”

I’m sure he’s thinking of our two Muslim students, but I’m sure there are a couple of students who are of the skeptical bent.

Four sweet, dark-haired, dark-eyed girls crowded around me and asked, almost in unison, “Can we go to the media center during lunch?” It’s Ramadan, and my four Muslim students (three are from Afghanistan and one is from Syria) are eager to avoid even the sight of food while they are fasting. They cluster together throughout the whole day: the guidance counselor purposely made their schedule so that they have almost every class together since they feel safest with each other. 

Of course, I agreed for them to go to the media center: growing up in a strange Christian sect that borrowed all the Jewish festivals, I had to fast one day a year during Yom Kippur, though our sect preferred the translated name, the Day of Atonement. I have a slight sense, then, of the challenge my Muslim students face, though only a very slight sense: we didn’t go to school or work on the Day of Atonement, and it was only one day. I can’t imagine what it would be like to fast all day and to go about one’s regular schedule at the same time, so I’m certainly sympathetic to the difficulties they face this month.

When we got back from lunch, the girls were waiting at the classroom door. They came into the room and immediately asked if they could go pray. “If we don’t pray while we’re fasting,” one girl explained, “it doesn’t count.” 

I looked at them quizzically: “Why didn’t you pray while you were in the media center during lunch?”

“It was too early,” another of the girls explained.

The skeptic in me wondered if they will start asking questions at some point. Would a truly good god be so upset that you prayed a few minutes early? Would a fair god be obsessed with females’ modesty in clothing while ignoring males’ modesty? Would a wise god really be all that worried about what animal you eat? These were the same kind of questions I asked myself years ago, and when I dallied in Catholicism a few years ago, I didn’t find resolution to these issues; I just temporarily stopped thinking about them. But once they’re there…