Battlefield of the Mind

A few weeks ago I had coffee with a friend from our small group.  It was one of the few times I felt I was truly able to relate to someone else with some issues we talked about.  At one point she recommended looking into a book, Battlefield of the Mind, by Joyce Meyer.  I didn't immediately run home and Google it, but when the thought about the book was still sitting with me a few days later I finally did.  The more I read about it online and read reviews about it, the more I thought that yes, this sounds like a good read that could benefit me in some areas, but even more than that it made me think about my mom.  From things her and I have talked about, it sounded like a perfect fit for her as well. I ended up shipping the book to her and plan on reading it whenever she is done.  I did find a mini-devotional in an app on my phone that is about the book with excerpts and topics from it, so I have enjoyed reading through that and getting a preview of it.

The book is basically about how your mind is a "battlefield" where you constantly have to be aware of your thoughts and fight to keep a positive focus in your life instead of allowing negativity to creep in and slowly overtake you.  It's amazing within the two weeks that I've been doing the mini-devotional, how much I have already truly noticed this for myself.  Even just with trivial things, I noticed how I was allowing negative thoughts to start to form in my mind, and sometimes I would choose to let them grow and soon after I found myself in a terrible woe-is-me frame of mind, and other times I would deliberately stop those thoughts and turn my focus to positive things and truths that I know.

Along these lines, tonight was my third night in a six week session/study on "The Theology of Suffering" put on by my church.  Someone in our group tonight said a quote that really struck me with all the things I've been thinking about and trying to process lately.  I don't remember who the quote was supposedly from, but it was:  No one steals your happiness more than you do.   In my mind that completely ties together with how we can choose to focus on the positive or choose to allow ourselves to be swallowed up by our own negativity.

Maybe I'm reaching and maybe this doesn't make sense or connect with anyone else, but tonight I felt like so many things were coming together in this grand picture and realization for me.  One of the ladies leading our study on suffering described an image tonight about what suffering could look like if it were a picture.  You would laugh if you saw my sketch in my journal, but I connected with it, so I attempted to draw it to remember how it made me view all of this.

She said that we rarely know our suffering is coming.  It usually hits us out of nowhere -or at least that's how it appears to us.  She described it like we're just walking along in our lives, and all of a sudden we are sucker punched in the gut.  It can be crippling and cause you to hunch over clutching your stomach.  After realizing the blow, you have a choice in how to react to it.  You can choose to crumple into the punch and allow yourself to be enveloped by it and wallow it in entirely.  Or you can choose to slowly open yourself back up, look around, and work through a process to get to a point where you can stand up straight again and eventually begin to walk forward. A third choice is to remain neutral about it and do nothing.  After the blow hits you and you hunch over grabbing your gut, you neither fold into it nor start to stand again, you pretty much try to ignore it and pretend it didn't happen.  Allowing yourself to do nothing and simply stay in the hunched over position is a choice you make.  Often times doing nothing seems like a safe option, but just like crumpling into the blow, it does not allow you to open up and heal so you can one day begin to move forward again.

I can't change how I have reacted to things in the past, but I do hope and pray that in whatever suffering may enter my life in the future, that after catching my breath, I choose to turn to God and slowly begin to stand and walk again, and even though I don't like it or understand it, to fully have faith and trust that God is there in the midst of it and using it all for his glory.

Am I tan yet?!

Obviously the main reason I love teaching is the kids.  And moments where you see them for the innocent-ridiculous-goofy kids that they truly are, always brighten my day.  This short story happened recently and I seriously needed it.  Just a good laugh and a moment to remember they are little kiddos and not actually people bound and determined to break all the rules in my classroom and drive me up a wall.  They don't mean to (always...).  They just can't help themselves yet.

Anyways.  To the funniness...

So as everyone is aware, winter isn't really feeling much like winter anymore.  At least not currently.  The kids at school are running around in t-shirts at recess and complaining it's already too hot.  So the other day at recess, I saw one of my boys laying on the ground in the play area.  -Part of our playground where the equipment is has the ground covered in gravel.  So he was basically laying in the rocks.  I thought he was hurt - had fallen and was crying or something.  So I go over to him and ask "What happened? Are you alright?"  He replies that he's fine and says something that I couldn't really hear.  So I ask what he's doing - if he's playing.  Again he replies with something I don't really understand.  So now I'm confused and still not sure what's going on.  I mean really -no other kid is laying in the rocks anywhere else that I can see, and it isn't THAT often that you see this at recess.  So I lean over and he definitely seems fine. He is smiling.  I ask him one more time "If you're not hurt and not playing, what are you doing?"  He starts laughing (he has tried to answer me three times and I just haven't heard or understood him) and says more loudly "I'm tanning!"  And as he touches his hand to his cheek he adds "Getting the sun!" A huge smile immediately spread across my face and I quickly walked off as I started laughing.  He -a 7 year old 2nd grader- was tanning, in February, by laying in the rocks fully clothed at recess. - Right in the middle of where all the other kids are running and they have to avoid him. 

The even better part of this story is that this boy has proceeded to tan EVERY day at recess this week!  I think it is amazing and it just cheers me up at the end of the day outside when I see him doing this.  Same spot on the rocks.  Same smile on his face.  Laying there - getting the sun.  

Today when our class was lining up at the end of recess, I overhead him ask another boy, one of his friends in our class, if his cheeks were tan yet. 

The kids are seriously the best part of my job.  I hope by the time I'm done teaching one day that I remember these stories just as much -if not more, than the more common ones about problem kids and classroom issues and disruptions and the extreme bad situations that instantly ruin not just your day but your entire week at school.  These stories about things like tanning are much nicer to think about.  I hope I have more like these to remember and that they eventually drown out the other ones.