Battle of the Mind

So many emotions visit me everyday of my life. I believe they do yours as well. I have disciplined myself to freeze the yucky thoughts, shine them into the Word of God and if they are truly yucky then I discard them in the name of my Lord Jesus. But this is a process and it takes time. Certainly not as much time as it used to.

For instance: I was looking over some pictures taken at our Church functions. I noted all the children, we LOOK like a great Sunday school class, but the reality is- we rarely have children in our Sunday school or in our church. We might have children once a month, and I never know which children will come, or what ages - it is very challenging to this Teacher. This has made it VERY difficult to prepare lessons. It can be VERY discouraging as I like to be organized and prepared. Countless times I have prepared a lesson only to have no students.

You can guess how satan loves to feed me gallons of yucky thoughts on that!

Well I have my lesson studied for tomorrow whether any children come or not. Did it hurt me to prepare a lesson from God's word? NO! I need to be into God's Word and into study mode, not just read mode.

However in light of my acknowledgment that I was feeling down about not having children in our church - I decided to actively fight it.

What I did next was to make little circle badges for the children who come to church tomorrow! It says " I came to Sunday School!"

I fought my stinking depressive thoughts with positive action.

NOW if children come I can reward them.

IF they do not come, I have fought a good fight!

Awesome Lord's Day

Today has been an Awesome Lord's Day and it is not yet over. I, along with so many people, have suffered from allergies/sinus all week- so it felt good to be in the House of the LORD even though we all had fragile voices, and low energy levels. Something powerful about the family of God being together.

I was so thankful the LORD brought in three children today for our SS class. They are little ones so we talked about the letter "A". Today it stood for ALL (for all have sinned - Romans 3:23) and for ANTS (Proverbs 6:6). We colored a big letter "A" Then glued raisins around the outline of the letter that represented ANTS. We acted like ants as we carried things on our back all around the table. When our load fell off, we could not be lazy, but be like ants, pick up our load and continue on. We also made an ant hill from a triangle that we covered with crushed graham cracker and had paper ants to glue around the hill- along with the words of Proverbs 6:6. The craft was fun - especially the crushing of the graham cracker that was inside a baggy. I used empty medicine bottles as our crushers. It worked nicely. It is hard for me to teach such little ones, but I also appreciate the S-T-R-E-T-C-H of three littles ones and not twenty. :)

This afternoon was our Nursing Home Ministry. That is always such a joy. Last week was the first time we canceled it in over two years. But too many of our team was sick, including me.
Today I talked about PRAYER. We played a recording of the song: The Lord's Prayer and I signed it to the people. Then I read the Lord's Prayer to them from Matthew 6 and Luke 11. This gave them three opportunities to HEAR and refresh in their minds the words that most of them knew. WE then recited the prayer together as a group. Then I had several prayers written by children. I read each one and we discussed how cute it sounds when you know a child has prayed it, but how we as adults often tell God how to do things, or make suggestions, or ask for things that are not to our best interest. The residents responded well as the simple prayers helped to connect their childness with their adultness. [I teach the Bible lesson to the assisted living unit and then I teach to the demenia unit]. We recited the Lord's prayer again and this time they were saying it with more meaning and it was a thrill to sense they have connected with the Word of God today.

So far it has been a powerful Lord's Day. The sermon this morning was powerful on Psalm 85. What a JOY to interpret the Word of God as my Husband preaches. God is so full of mercy, grace, love, compassion, righteousness and Truth! And the day is not over!