“Your son has a gift!”

That’s how my husband’s professor effused about him to my in-laws just before commencement yesterday. She was referring to the fact that she’d observed him working with medically fragile and non-verbal children while student teaching for his master’s in special education this past year. And she couldn’t help but note that he has a way of getting through to them.

I guess you could call it a gift. That certainly implies that it’s not learned but more natural. But I like to think it goes beyond that. I, too, have seen my husband work with children. He’s been a teacher for over fourteen years and, even outside the classroom, he relates to children like no one else I’ve seen.

Children gravitate to him. In some invisible realm we can’t measure or detect with science, they instinctively know that he understands them. Maybe it’s empathy. I can see how you’d call it that.

The closest I’ve come to locking onto what it is—my husband’s gift—is to label it as compassion. And even that description seems inadequate. What he does—something that seems to require no effort on his part, and yet often requires Herculean diligence in most of us—is more than just pausing to consider someone else’s perspective. He connects on a level so deep as to be indistinguishable from the person he’s connecting with.

I’m not deifying him. My husband has his bad days. He’s had those kids in his classroom that many would label unreachable. But I’ve seen him walk back into situations that seemed hopeless, determined to try and try and try because he can’t not try to find that connection. Like a laptop constantly in search of a wi-fi signal. But his battery doesn’t die. If anything, the need to find that signal makes him stronger.

Whether or not he knows it, my husband has taught me a lot. About love. About strength of conviction. And about compassion. He stands today as the person I most want to be like. I can’t shake the feeling that if I could tap into whatever it is that fuels his compassion and access even a fraction of what’s there, I would be a better person. I know this.

Yesterday was the end of three long years of work to earn his master’s. In the fall, he’ll start work in the Minneapolis school district, doing a job that fulfills and exhausts at the same time. I know he’s up to the task. There’s just no way I could be prouder of him.