Daniela's Discovery

Her self-esteem may have been in tatters, but her faith remained intact, as Lee Dunstan discovered when he talked to uni lecturer Daniela Schubert.

For Daniela Schubert, an expatriate lecturer at the Pacific Adventist University, in Port Moresby, PNG, the walk of faith through discouragement began when the dean of her department walked into her office.
“There was an expression of worry on his face,” she says. “He asked me how my classes were going, explaining that some students had complained about my teaching.
“OK, I suppose,” I replied, “. . . considering.”

For Daniela, for whom English is a second language, it was her first semester in the department and followed a rather traumatic ending to a teaching post in another school in a different country. She accepted the dean’s suggestion of distributing a questionnaire to the students to see how they felt about the course and its presentation.

“Later, when I read the responses from my troublesome class, tears started rolling down my face,” she says. “It was obvious the students were unhappy with me. I’d never before read such a bad report of my performance. They were saying things like, ‘We need a qualified lecturer’; ‘This class is boring’; and, ‘This subject is terrible.’

“But I was looking at the situation as at a glass being half empty rather than half full—I wasn’t paying attention to those who said, ‘This subject is OK,’ or ‘This subject is very good.’

“I was so humiliated, wondering however I could face them after such a bad report? Am I really such a hopeless teacher? I wondered. Am I wasting God’s time and money being here?”

It was no surprise that when the dean asked Daniela how the survey had gone, she broke down. “Bad!” she blurted, swallowing her tears. “But I want to give it to my three other classes; I want to see how bad I really am . . . to see if it’s just that class.”
Daniela says that right there, in her discouragement, she was on the verge of ending her teaching career. But she gave out the surveys anyway, then checked the results.

“Thankfully, the students in my other classes weren’t so harsh. They found me and the classes ‘interesting’ and ‘valuable.’”
But while Daniela’s career may have been saved, she still had a long way to go.

“It was the hardest, most humiliating thing I’ve done walking back into that classroom of 53 students,” she says. “But closing the door of my office on the way, I silently offered a prayer: Dear God, I can’t do this by myself, but You and I together can. If it’s You who’s called me to do this job, then You’d better give me what it takes to do it properly.”

It was “You and I,” says Daniela. “Every single class for the rest of the semester! Every one was a huge struggle and, always, after every class, I exited feeling defeat, feeling I was a hopeless teacher. What kind of a lecture was that? I would hear in my head. It was a constant battle with self-doubt, a crisis of faith in myself, maybe, but not in God.

“It wasn’t until later that I realised this battle was actually against unseen powers—the powers of darkness that Paul talks about [see Ephesians 6:12]. And God wasn’t far away. He had help ready at hand for me. He surrounded me with people who were supportive, giving me ideas and praying with me, not forgetting a caring husband, who encouraged me and urged me on, knowing that I had much to offer.

“God also opened the way for me to visit places about which I taught, which allowed me to breathe real life and passion into what I was presenting.”

Daniela continues in her teaching career, and in even more difficult classes her students express appreciation and interest. “They say I’m an excellent lecturer, or at least, a ‘very good’ one,” she says wryly.

“This experience helped me to better understand Paul’s words of encouragement, who says, ‘I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong’ [2 Corinthians 12: 9, 10].”

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