Good Morning!
Teacher: Buenos días, clase. (Good morning, class.)
Students: Buenos días, Profe Taylor. (Good morning, Professor Taylor.)
(Ten minutes, and many words, pass.)
Student: So, we just had a ten-minute discussion about saying “Good morning”?
Teacher: Yes, we certainly did.
As the teacher in charge of these proceedings, I ensured that we held this ten-minute discussion at the opening of each of my high-school Spanish classes that day. After all, this conversation was about much more than saying “Good morning”—or, more accurately, about how saying “Good morning” was so much more than the students thought it was.
In the highlands of Guatemala, where I began my career as a teacher, I learned an unwritten rule: If you make eye contact with someone—even if you are strangers—you greet them verbally. And if a meeting were held, those present would delay its start until everyone had greeted one another, because—while the content of the meeting may have mattered—the people attending the meeting mattered even more.
“Within your world,” I asked my students, “how do we communicate to someone that they matter?”
We brainstormed an extensive yet not exhaustive list, which included things such as:
Smiling at someone
Striking up a conversation
Asking someone a question (to hear some of their personal story)
Giving someone a compliment
Inviting someone to do something with you
Spending time together
Listening to someone
Joking with someone
Telling someone that you like them
Telling someone that you love them
Touching someone (at an appropriate time and in an appropriate way)
“What about eye contact?” I asked my students, many of whom were more comfortable looking at screens than into people’s faces.
“Awkward,” some of them said.
“That’s interesting,” I told them. “In some cultures, it can be viewed as disrespectful for some sorts of people to look other sorts of people in the eyes. And for people with autism, it can sometimes feel too intense, although they can develop greater comfort with it over time. Also, it’s certainly true that we can look at someone for too long—and then it becomes staring! But, in general, one of the best ways you can communicate to someone that they matter is to look them in the eyes.”
One of my duties during this past school year was to greet sleepy students as they entered the school building at the beginning of the school day. As I held the door open for them, I did my best to make them feel a sense of belonging with eye contact, a smile, and words of welcome.
Then, later in the day, when the students were more awake, I stood waiting for them outside of my Spanish classroom door, where we greeted one another according to our custom. For several years, the tradition has been: Our eyes meet briefly, we give one another a finger slap/fist bump and they say a password that allows them to enter the room. Sometimes these are funny words. Sometimes they are grammatically targeted words. Most often, they are Eternal words that speak to the nature of reality, including the character of God and who we are in relation to Him.
During our ten-minute conversations, I asked the students, “When you greet someone, do you give them value?” and “If you refuse to acknowledge someone, do you take that away?” When I saw that many of them were responding affirmatively with words and nodded heads, I stopped them and said:
No, I’m sorry; that is incorrect. As humans, we do not have that right or power. Each day since you have had me as a teacher, you have entered this room saying things like “Yo soy un hijo/una hija del Rey (I am a son/daughter of the King),” “Soy una persona, el pináculo de la buena creación de Dios (I am a person, the pinnacle of God’s good creation),” and “Jesucristo murió en la cruz por mí (Jesus Christ died on the cross for me).” It is God alone who gives us value.
At creation, God created us “very good” and made us “in his image.” With the Incarnation, God took on human flesh to dwell among us. He walked this Earth to teach us a new way of living. He defeated death for us upon the cross. He rose again to bring us to new life and then ascended to prepare a place for us to dwell with him and his people for all eternity. Our value is found in these things, and nothing we do can add to that or take that away.
It was critical to establish this.
And it was also critical not to end with this. After all, students must know that what we do and say to one another still matters greatly. For while we do not bestow value upon one another, our greetings can certainly acknowledge it.
Unfortunately, we may not believe deep down all these things about God loving us. Or we may forget, and need to see the face of God shining upon us through the smiling faces of teachers and friends who look upon us and greet us. As Bill St. Cyr of Ambleside Schools International reminded me recently, when we communicate to students, “It’s good to be me, here with you,” they may come to see that God thinks and feels this about them too.[1]
In any greeting, the opportunity to recognize the value of the other person is present, regardless of the words that are used. But in this case of “Good morning” (or “Good afternoon,” “Good evening,” or “Good night”), the words also hold significant meaning for me.
When I tell students “Good morning,” occasionally one or two will respond under their breath with a mumbled “No, it’s not.” “Oh, really?” I will reply, and gently solicit further details. Most of the time, the troubles are relatively minor (even in their own estimation)—but if they are serious, I may offer to pray with the students if I feel the Spirit leading me to do so.
In these cases when students dissent, they understand my greeting in a descriptive sense and dispute its truthfulness based on their current life circumstances. As I sometimes tell them, though, this is only one of two ways in which I use the phrase “Good morning.”
Sometimes I also use the phrase as a hope and wish for them—that their life may be full of good things. No teacher wants their students to lead lives of abject misery. We know that they will experience struggles—and that some of them may even be necessary for the formation of their character—but we still desire that they experience blessings such as friendship, good health, loving families, success in learning, and meaningful work. And to the extent that trauma has touched their past, we long for them to experience healing and redemption and to recover a sense of lightness in the way they see the world.
And when I do use the greeting descriptively, I do so as a declaration and an invitation for students to see the world as it fundamentally is. Even amidst the real struggles they face, it is nevertheless “God’s morning.” As students awaken, they enter each day into a “God-bathed” and “God-permeated” world.[2] And as they go through the day, they can come to see that the afternoon, evening, and night are his as well. For a time, God may allow for some things to be other than he wishes them to be—or as they will be on that day when he makes things fully new.[3] Yet that does not negate the truths that his good gifts are all around our students, that he is present with them, and that his love for them endures forever.
So, with only a simple smile, a meeting of the eyes, and two brief words, let us communicate to students that this world is a good place to be and that it is a good thing that they are in it.
Good morning!
Footnotes:
[1] Bill St. Cyr mentioned this in one of his addresses during the Ambleside Schools International Summer Institute at RiverTree School in Crystal, Minnesota from July 30-August 6, 2024.
[2] For more on this, see Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God (San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco, 1998), 61–62.
[3] Willard, The Divine Conspiracy, 61. This view of God as permitting things contrary to his own wishes (for the time being) does not, in Willard’s view, diminish his sovereignty because he is the one who has chosen it to be so.