This week I began year number ten of driving a school bus. What began as a side gig a few years ago to make a few bucks has become something I genuinely love to do, and something I will try to continue doing long after I retire from church work. My middle school kids are usually hilarious, sometimes horrifying...but I am grateful for each one. My bus may be one of the most culturally and racially diverse groups of people you'll ever find. About half of my kids are white, while the other half is equally divided into kids of Hispanic, Black, and Asian descent. There are times whether I wonder whether all of them are 'legal', and I think about the coming day in which some masked ICE thug decides he wants to drag one of them off my bus for the crime of being brought to America, land of the free and home of the brave. I've come to the realization that I will offer myself up for arrest in their place, not as some moral hero but simply because I'd want somebody else to do for the same for one of my children.
Tonight I was mowing the yard and I was thinking a lot about how well our Dear Leader might do driving a school bus. Can you imagine that whiny and thin-skinned dope and how he'd deal with 60 unruly middle schoolers? They would tear him apart. 10 minutes on a bus with those kids and Trump would be screaming about how he is going to sue them or deport them. I doubt he could finish a route without them making such fun of him that he runs off the bus crying and saying how unfair everything is.
Kids can be cruel and mean sometimes...that's what they are, just as that's what we were at that age. We found the tiniest little thing to get under an authority figure's skin and we just picked and burrowed and poked and prodded until some of them broke. Many of them, who were not so concerned with letting a 12-year-old determine their self worth, let us run ourselves out, loving us the whole time while slowly teaching us the important lessons of life. Those who couldn't do these things didn't stay as teachers or youth ministers or anybody who dealt with kids for very long, usually running away screaming after a year or two. The rest stuck around, grew a pair, and realized that God had put them in this thankless job and so they might as well try to find the humor in it all.
Occasionally I might meet somebody new and when they ask me what I do I tell them that I'm a minister for a small church and a bus driver. They almost never want to acknowledge the first, but the second thing will usually provoke a response of 'Oh, I could never do that!'. Yeah, they're right. They couldn't. But I would love to see the world's worst egotistical blowhard try. In his mind he'd be better at it than everybody. But his failure would be worth almost any price to watch.
