Schools

Former MHS Teacher Seeks Your Help

Rob Carter, now a pastor in Virginia, is working on a project to help wounded veterans

The traits that made Rob Carter a beloved teacher at Montville High School are the very same traits that led him to his current career, working as a chaplain and a pastor in Fredericksburg, VA.

And through that new career, he became involved with the family of Christopher Coffland, and a project that pulls all these threads together.

 

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The attitude

Carter taught at St. Thomas More, and then at Montville High School, from 1997-2003.

“In Montville,” he says, “anyone who was in my classroom, if they needed some sort of accommodation,” he was willing to give it.

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A student might not be a good test-taker, but might be a good writer, or good at building things, making web pages, making movies, Carter says. If the student had trouble in one area, but excelled in another, Carter worked with the student’s strength.

And he focused on projects.

“I believe that students remember when there are projects,” he says. "When kids get messy they remember.”

 

The Calling

“Teaching and getting to know folks led me to the calling that took me out of Montville,” he says.

While he was teaching, the father of two boys he had in his classes shot and killed the boys’ mother.

 A young boy committed suicide. “It was a total surprise,” he says.

A young girl died from salmonella poisoning.

“I started wanting to pray and be doing more with kids than just teaching history,” Carter says.

He heard the calling, and he applied to seminary school and was accepted.

 

The Project

Now, he is the pastor of a church in Virginia, and is also the chaplain of his Reserve unit.

It is here that he heard of Chris Coffland, and met his parents, and put his teaching, his calling and his pasturing together.

“You are ministering to the families and those who stay behind, and that’s why it’s important to treasure the sacrifices that have been made. If I should die, that’s how I should be treated. As a chaplain, we care for the living.”

Carter met Coffland’s parents, and talked with them. When the Give a Soldier a Lift project started, they got in touch with Carter.

Catch a Lift was started, the website says, “as a memorial to Chris Coffland and founded on his lifelong philosophy that through physical fitness you can achieve your highest potential for a healthy mind and body.”

Every day, the website says, Coffland would say, “I’m goin’ to catch a lift,” as he ent off to the gym.

A donation to the project helps wounded veterans from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars “start and maintain their healing process, both mentally and physically, through physical fitness by providing them with gifted gym memberships and to honor the men and women who gave their life for our country.”

The program pays for yearly gym memberships for wounded veterans, and pays for a buddy’s membership, too, if the veteran needs help in the gym.

 

The man

Chris Coffland sounds like one of the most inspiring people you would ever want to meet.

Here is part of the biography on the project’s website:

Coffland's biography suggests a man auditioning to become the next Indiana Jones: Playing professional football in Finland. Hunting crocodiles by night with the Pygmies of Gabon, Africa. Making men 20 years his junior look like slugs in Army boot camp. Coffland lived those and dozens of other adventures.

He did not bounce from job to job and country to country because he lacked purpose, loved ones said. In fact, he often moved to the next thing because no vocation made him feel he was doing enough for the greater good.

"He didn't care about success in the conventional sense," said his Gilman School classmate and longtime friend Dan Miller. "He had to find something that would be consistent with the purest expression of his spirit."

Coffland watched as his friends married, had children and settled into prosperous careers. He knew they and his parents wanted the same for him.

"He respected his friends, adored them," said his sister and closest friend, Lynn Coffland. "But he could not settle for what was not in his heart."

 

To donate

Go to the Christopher Coffland Memorial Fund website, and look for the “Catch a lift” logo. Count on spending a little time on the site itself, learning about a remarkable man.

 


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