Even two decades into my career, I still experience fatigue and weariness in my job at times. I like to describe these periods as “the tunnel.”

The tunnel—it's dimly lit, monotonous, and has no view or tangible reward in sight. If it’s a really long tunnel, it doesn’t feel like I’m making any progress while navigating through it. And even though I’m exerting effort, it all just seems to blend together. 

What's a teacher like you or me to do when we find ourselves in the tunnel?

Here's one thing I’ve found to be helpful: look for the beauty.

Jesus often points His listeners toward the beauty of nature in His teachings. When addressing anxiety in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus has us consider the lilies of the field and the birds of the air. He describes the Kingdom of God as akin to a pearl of great price. And, in explaining how life in the Kingdom works, He paints naturalistic pictures in His parable of the sower and His metaphor of the mustard seed.

The implication for us tunnel-traversing teachers is straightforward: even in the midst of hardship, we can train ourselves to see the beauty. We just need to look.

Finding beauty in the classroom is one of the great spiritual disciplines of teaching. Like all disciplines, it is a learnable, practicable, and improvable skill. Just as push-ups are a reliable means to strengthen our bodies, searching for beauty in our classrooms will strengthen our souls.

So, what is this beauty that we’re looking for?

I think of beauty as a felt sense of goodness. It's when you feel like a small but connected part of a large and wondrous picture. It's when you long for the thing you're beholding, and so you keep beholding it. It’s when our inner ear catches a bit of the silent harmonies God’s creation is playing all the time.

And as our brother C. S. Lewis puts it in his sermon “The Weight of Glory,” beauty evokes a deep yearning within us, one that will one day most certainly be fulfilled:

“We do not want merely to see beauty… . We want something else which can hardly be put into words—to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.”

I love how Lewis gets at the gravitational pull of beauty. When we see it, our souls are drawn in; we want to enter into it.

And I know that all of that sounds quite subjective. But that’s actually a good thing because it means that beauty can be found if we seek to find it—whether we’re in the tunnel or not. 

What I find during my tunnel periods is that, as I seek to note small moments of beauty in my classroom, the more I look for them, the more I find them.

So in our classrooms today, we can begin to look:

• For a student’s quiet but inquisitive face
• For those moments when we smile at students, and they smile back
• For those surprising things that our students say
• For the way in which students’ questions can result in teachable moments
• For those ever-so-minor signs of progress in a student’s behavior or affect or mastery of material

This search for beauty isn’t easy—Jesus never promised that it would be. But the more we look for it, the more we find it.

Dave Stuart Jr. is a husband and dad who teaches high school students in a small town. He writes about teaching students toward long-term flourishing at DaveStuartJr.com.