“But my answer to you is, and…this is a challenge to all of you students today,” Pence went on to say. “Teaching is a calling. I wanted to teach school from when I was a little girl. I knew, this is what I want to do. I know that I’m going to be good at it. I know God has given me this gift. And so remember, it’s a calling.”
“And if God is calling you to teach, he’s going to give you the grace,” Pence said. “He’s going to be with you. So if you feel that calling, I really urge you to act on it.”
When she taught at the Christian school, Pence said that “one thing we constantly were reminding each other of is to be always on the lookout for kingdom moments.” It was easy to be rushed and focused on getting one class out the door so the next could start.
But sometimes she “would see a student, that they really needed me to stop the agenda for the day and listen to them and focus them back on Christ. You have those kingdom moments every single day, so just be conscious of those,” said Pence.
Other topics the panel discussed included the value of parents choosing where their children go to school and how Pence came to see the value of homeschooling. At the end of the discussion, Hogue asked Pence to give the CCU students, faculty and staff a final charge.
“You know, the lips of the righteous nourish many,” Pence said, going on to draw a lesson from the experience she and her husband had with infertility. One of the results of that struggle was that when Pence did have children and she was frustrated with them, she would pause to reflect on how she almost didn’t have children at all.
“If you are given an opportunity to teach children, that is a place where God has placed you, to encourage and train up those children, and that is treasure in heaven,” she said.
“And so when you have those rough days, because you will, just take a moment and think, ‘Wow, but God is entrusting me with these 20 kindergartners. He’s entrusting me,’” said Pence. “It’s a humbling thing. And so don’t lose sight of the fact that you are being called for this purpose.”
