Mrs. Archibald’s A

Have you ever thought of someone who benefitted your life, whom you’d really like to thank? Mrs. Archibald, my second grade teacher, is one such person for me. She caught me cheating when we were supposed to be correcting our papers with her aid as we sat around the small table at the front of the room. She’d give the correct answer, and we were to mark the wrong answers, then go and redo them, if they were in error. We’d gone from adding to learning to multiply that week in Math. Only I kept on adding instead of multiplying, and getting every answer wrong. On the third time through, instead of noting the wrong answers, I lightly penciled into the margin of my paper the correct answers. Mrs. Archibald looked up, and saw what I was doing. I was caught red-handed the very first time I’d ever cheated on a paper.

Mrs. Archibald was appalled. Her reaction spread through the classroom. All the kids held their breath, and looked to see what would happen to one who had done something so bad as I had done. Our teacher took me down the long hall to the principle’s office, where there was a great big paddle hanging on the wall, which was still used in those days for discipline in schools. I’d seen that paddle when it was my turn to go down and pick up milk cartons for the rest of the students at lunch times in the past. It was a fearsome thing. Up to that point in my academic career, I had avoided it. Now I knew what I had coming.

To my amazement, Mrs. Archibald didn’t take down that huge paddle with the holes drilled in it to allow the passage of air, and to waffle iron your behind with welts when it struck. Instead, she took off her shoe and removed the inner liner that she put there to protect her bunions. That bunion cushion would have drifted to the floor like a feather, if she had dropped it. I was instructed to bend over to receive my just due. Then Mrs. Archibald gave me several severely innocuous swats with that bit of a no-account punishing device.

Now I knew what an actual licking felt like. My Dad used his belt, or sometimes a switch from a bush when he gave spankings. He laid it on, and there were welts. Then we’d sit on the arms of his big easy chair and cry into his shirt sleeves while he rubbed our bums until they quit hurting. Dad always said giving us spankings hurt him more than it did us, but I never quite believed him, because his spankings really did hurt. From the look on Mrs. Archibald’s face, however, and the tear in her eye, and her trembling lip, I could see the truth: This spanking really had hurt her far more than it did me.

Then Mrs. Archibald pulled out her big guns. She said, “Skip, now we must kneel down and ask God to forgive you for cheating.” So we knelt there together by the milk machine’s hum, and I listened while Mrs. Archibald pleaded with God to forgive me for my sin, and to help me never to cheat again. Then, she told me, it was my turn to confess to God directly for the wrong I had done. Frankly, the big whopping paddle on the wall would have been an easier thing. But with burning ears, and quavering voice, I called myself guilty for my classroom crime to Heaven’s listening ear, and asked God to forgive me, and to help me never to cheat again.

To this day, I’m not so great on Math. My wife takes care of the all the numbers in our house that aren’t symbolic ones from Scriptures I’m exploring for sermons. But Mrs. Archibald certainly cured me of cheating. I didn’t cheat in grade school, and never got another licking. I didn’t cheat in high school, where I discovered I could get better grades by studying than my friends could get marking answers off of other student’s papers who hadn’t studied either. I didn’t cheat in college, even when I saw the cheat cards hidden in students hands and up their sleeves during exams. I still wasn’t cheating during my post grad Seminary studies, when the preaching test given to all the homeletics students one year was discovered to be precisely the same one given the year before. Many of my fellow preachers-in-training didn’t bother to read more than the old copies of students’ tests from the year before. Me? I slogged through that entire book, page by page, underlining as I went.

Then the professors discovered their error in giving the old test from the past year to the earlier class my year. They hastily regrouped and wrote an entirely new test for the rest of our preaching classes. Many of my fellow classmates bombed that new test badly. It was a poorly constructed test that quizzed us on incidental trivia, and didn’t contain a single key thought from the entire volume.

I got an “A” on that test. No thanks to me, of course. If you straighten a bent twig early enough, and it can’t help but grow in a more profitable heavenward direction. That “A” didn’t belong to me. It belonged to Mrs. Archibald.

Has there been someone in your life who helped you along the way? If you can, thank them for it. If it is too late (Mrs. Archibald is surely dead long ago), thank God for them. If He gives you the opportunity, be that person for someone else who follows you.

“All discipline for the moment seems not to be joyful, but sorrowful; yet to those who have been trained by it, afterwards it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness.” Hebrews 12:11 NASB

Submitted by Pastor Skip Johnson
Omak, Washington