This is November, the season of Thanksgiving. I love this month! It is the time of fall leaves, hot tea/cider, cooler temps, and the time that I get to travel to see my sister and her family in Alabama! Plus, as a school teacher, I now get the whole week off! I’m grateful for that. It’s been a busy fall semester for our family.
Here’s what I’m thankful for this season in the first few days of November…
Nov 1st, Candy in a huge Publix bag from a family who donated their extras to our class. It’s wonderful because I use it for positive reinforcers for toilet training! Also, there is a group of lower income students that waits in my hallway after school that I reward as well for good behavior/helping in my classroom in the afternoons.
Nov 2nd, Seeing a Memory Care place for my mom with my parents, aunt, and uncle. We were able to tour and ask questions. It was good for all! It gives me peace of mind knowing where she could go if something happens to my father. Her other choice is a beautiful community a mile from my sister’s home.
Nov 3rd, Two of the young three year old boys in my class successfully peed in the potty! They had the biggest smiles and we did too as their teachers! Kids with Developmental Delays are just precious. They really do make gains with patience, love, and a little bit of candy/stickers!
Nov 4th, Time to walk with my friend in the morning to catch up on our families. Time to go to Walmart to buy needed groceries and some early Christmas gifts! Yes, they have it out! Thankful also for a date night with my husband to our new Mexican restaurant. It was pretty good foodwise, and it’s always nice conversation with my best friend.
Nov 5th, extra time this morning to work on things online. The others are sleeping in. We’ll do church later and family pictures this afternoon! YAY! I’m so grateful to have this season of thankfulness.
What are you thankful for this week? Drop me a comment if you have time!
I am striving again. Striving for every activity to fit in. Striving for peace. Striving for achievement. I am a “busy bee.” I’m always doing something. I find it hard to sit still and rest. It is something I’ve struggled with for decades. I feel this need to please others and myself.
This can be dangerous. Trying to constantly make basket after basket in a basketball game would leave a player spent. They need the team. They need the coach. Life is like that…
I need God. I need Him to coach me and my family. We need him to center our lives around what truly matters. I forget to listen to my coach sometimes and insist on doing things in my own way and in my own strength. It leaves me exhausted and missing “baskets.”
I need a team. I’m not a solo player even though I sometimes feel that way or that pressure. My team is composed of my family, my friends, and my colleagues. There are even acquaintances/strangers on my team. I need that new massage therapist that is on the horizon. I need to relax more and let others help. It’s a struggle. I strive too much. I’m glad this prompt came up. I’m glad I have time to reflect on the need for the Coach and the team!
What do you do to cease striving? Pray? Sit? Take a nap? I think I may try all three today! Striving must cease. We must depend on Him and not our own whims.
Dear God,
You are our amazing Coach! Forgive me for not sitting on the bench to hear your instructions. I want to play “the game” constantly. I need to practice sitting. I need to practice using my team to supplement my own work. Give me the grace to let go. Give me the courage to slow down instead of rushing through tasks. It will all work out okay with or without me. You are the Divine organizer of things, not me. I love you!
This Five Minute Friday post prompt word is “Attempt.”
I attempt to manage my emotions. I flux between happy, anxious, tired, disappointed, angry, sad, and proud. I know all of these adjectives because they are fresh in my mind as I explain and show the expressions on my face in my pre-school class. We have cardboard cut outs with brightly colored backdrops with an empty circle in the middle of each…they are labeled with emotions. The kids love playing with them…making silly faces and seeing the adults do the same. It is hysterical actually.
The kids are learning to label their emotions too. There is one little girl who is quite candid about her feelings. Her latest is “angry.” She will start to get loud, throw/kick something, and say “I’M ANGRY!!!” We hide our smiles and disappointment a bit, but we try to calm her immediately so that she doesn’t hurt herself or another child. She is usually pretty quick to calm down with a hug, a walk, a favorite book, or even going to see the fish across the hall in the aquarium. We all need to label our emotions sometimes, but we do need to be careful on how our emotions impact ourselves or others.
Go ahead and be angry. You do well to be angry—but don’t use your anger as fuel for revenge. And don’t stay angry. Don’t go to bed angry. Don’t give the Devil that kind of foothold in your life.
Dear God,
You are the one who gave us emotions. Help us to attempt to embrace them, accept them, and with your help change them if necessary. Forgive us for our anger. Thank you for the opportunity to attempt to teach emotional regulation to little ones. Give me the grace, peace, love, and your Light to emanate You. We are blessed with this opportunity to impact future generations. Thank you,
Jennifer
p.s. Thanks for the prayer time daily with fellow special ed teachers to pray over our school, teachers, staff, students, and our own families. I treasure these times with You and with them. I’m grateful God placed me with these ladies.
16-18 God spoke to Moses: “You’re about to die and be buried with your ancestors. You’ll no sooner be in the grave than this people will be up and lusting after the foreign gods of this country that they are entering. They will abandon me and violate my Covenant that I’ve made with them. I’ll get angry, oh so angry! I’ll walk off and leave them on their own, won’t so much as look back at them. Then many calamities and disasters will devastate them because they are defenseless. They’ll say, ‘Isn’t it because our God wasn’t here that all this evil has come upon us?’ But I’ll stay out of their lives, keep looking the other way because of all their evil: they took up with other gods!
19-21 “But for right now, copy down this song and teach the People of Israel to sing it by heart. They’ll have it then as my witness against them. When I bring them into the land that I promised to their ancestors, a land flowing with milk and honey, and they eat and become full and get fat and then begin fooling around with other gods and worshiping them, and then things start falling apart, many terrible things happening, this song will be there with them as a witness to who they are and what went wrong. Their children won’t forget this song; they’ll be singing it. Don’t think I don’t know what they are already scheming to do, and they’re not even in the land yet, this land I promised them.”Read full chapter
There were lots of songs in the old testament. There is a whole chapter of songs in the Psalms. This excerpt with the word “COPY” came up in my search in BibleGateway. I enjoy the Message version of the Bible. I recommended to ladies who didn’t know about it in my book club this past week. We meet on Thursday nights, and it is such a blessing to read alongside these ladies and to discuss our heavenly Father.
We need to teach others how to sing songs, pray prayers, and simply BE with our Father who art in Heaven, hallowed by His name. We are a people in a fallen world, and we NEED Him desperately. We all struggle with something we are finding out as we share and pray for one another in this group of women. We have sickness, financial insecurity, fears, and woes as mothers and grandmothers. We are learning to LOVE one another big. We text each other, pray for each other, and read more in the Waymaker by Ann Voskamp. Ann is sharing her story, and in turn we are sharing our own stories among one another. It is a rich life when are willing to open up our hearts to the Holy Spirit and to other Believers. We can really see God moving when we pray. We can see Him moving in our lives when we pay attention and really look. We give thanks. We cry out for help. We know that if we copy the songs of the Bible we will experience his LOVE in our lives.
What is your favorite praise/worship song? Mine is Shout to the Lord…I’ll include a link to it below:
This week’s Five Minute Friday prompt word is “Opinion,” and I’m going to tackle that one here…
I have found that holding onto your opinion is critical…when you need to speak up you need to advocate for yourself or others. Other times, you need to hold onto your opinion in your mind but not with your words. There are certain people who cannot handle your opinion. There are some that need to hear what you have to say, and there are others that will remain unchanged even if you DO speak your two cents.
When have you had an opinion about something that needed to remain unspoken?
I encountered this situation over the past few days. I spoke my opinion on Friday night to many, but come Saturday I realized that my opinion didn’t much matter to others…only to me. I held my tongue on Saturday, and things went much more smoothly! I am learning to present my thoughts to the Father first verse spewing my own thoughts so vocally.
It is very natural for young men to be vehement, acrimonious and severe. For as they seldom comprehend at once all the consequences of a position, or perceive the difficulties by which cooler and more experienced reasoners are restrained from confidence, they form their conclusions with great precipitance. Seeing nothing that can darken or embarrass the question, they expect to find their own opinion universally prevalent, and are inclined to impute uncertainty and hesitation to want of honesty, rather than of knowledge. –Samuel Johnson
Welcome with open arms fellow believers who don’t see things the way you do. And don’t jump all over them every time they do or say something you don’t agree with—even when it seems that they are strong on opinions but weak in the faith department. Remember, they have their own history to deal with. Treat them gently.
Have you ever felt the urge to get out of a touchy situation or a difficult to read room? I know I have felt the need to get out. The desire to escape. As I’ve talked about before on recent posts, I teach special needs children. We lock our doors on the inside and on the outside to ensure our children do not escape our care.
At first I didn’t even know how to escape my own classroom until the sweet teacher next door taught me how the child lock worked! Special education is definitely a team approach. I have a sweet assistant named Mrs. J. She is precious and has done this type of job for decades. She homeschooled her own children and then went to work in special education. She has worked as an assistant for enough time to be wiser than I am! I am grateful God placed her into my life and into my classroom.
We have one especially difficult student. B, oh sweet but challenging B. He is a hurricane of a kid. He comes in quietly but usually ends the day with a flourish of feelings and physical behaviors. I love him, but he also has me wanting out of the room sometimes! We take breaks for sure, but we still have to be with him most of the day and make sure he and others are safe.
Have you ever wanted out? Did you want to escape? Did God provide a way for that?
God gave me a mixed blessing this week. The little B boy was sick with a strange virus that dropped your temperature to 96 degrees with cold chills/fever. Then the feelings passed within 12 hours. With fatigue remaining. I loved on this little boy on Tuesday at school with these symptoms. And of course that evening I had the same requiring me to escape a day of work! LOL!
I felt like a million bucks come Thursday (yesterday). I was so grateful for a chance to escape my daily routine in favor of much needed rest, a chance to read many books and finish 1 of the 5 I have going. I had the chance to escape the many directions that my usual days pull me into. God gave me a way to escape the everyday in favor of calm. In favor of rest. I’m grateful.
Dear God,
YOU are our escape sometimes. Forgive us when we don’t run to YOU first. Give us hearts that seek you and YOUR word. Thank you for the ways you keep us safe with NO escape, and the ways you do allow us to escape in out ways. We love you.
Always,
Jennifer
p.s. Below is a chapter of God’s Word that I’m reading everyday in September thanks to an Instagram challenge from another Christian author: @amyelainewrites…read on…it’s GOOD stuff…
Psalm 139 The Message
139 1-6 God, investigate my life; get all the facts firsthand. I’m an open book to you; even from a distance, you know what I’m thinking. You know when I leave and when I get back; I’m never out of your sight. You know everything I’m going to say before I start the first sentence. I look behind me and you’re there, then up ahead and you’re there, too— your reassuring presence, coming and going. This is too much, too wonderful— I can’t take it all in!
7-12 Is there anyplace I can go to avoid your Spirit? to be out of your sight? If I climb to the sky, you’re there! If I go underground, you’re there! If I flew on morning’s wings to the far western horizon, You’d find me in a minute— you’re already there waiting! Then I said to myself, “Oh, he even sees me in the dark! At night I’m immersed in the light!” It’s a fact: darkness isn’t dark to you; night and day, darkness and light, they’re all the same to you.
13-16 Oh yes, you shaped me first inside, then out; you formed me in my mother’s womb. I thank you, High God—you’re breathtaking! Body and soul, I am marvelously made! I worship in adoration—what a creation! You know me inside and out, you know every bone in my body; You know exactly how I was made, bit by bit, how I was sculpted from nothing into something. Like an open book, you watched me grow from conception to birth; all the stages of my life were spread out before you, The days of my life all prepared before I’d even lived one day.
17-22 Your thoughts—how rare, how beautiful! God, I’ll never comprehend them! I couldn’t even begin to count them— any more than I could count the sand of the sea. Oh, let me rise in the morning and live always with you! And please, God, do away with wickedness for good! And you murderers—out of here!— all the men and women who belittle you, God, infatuated with cheap god-imitations. See how I hate those who hate you, God, see how I loathe all this godless arrogance; I hate it with pure, unadulterated hatred. Your enemies are my enemies!
23-24 Investigate my life, O God, find out everything about me; Cross-examine and test me, get a clear picture of what I’m about; See for yourself whether I’ve done anything wrong— then guide me on the road to eternal life.
We don’t have to rely on the world’s guesses and opinions. We didn’t learn this by reading books or going to school; we learned it from God, who taught us person-to-person through Jesus, and we’re passing it on to you in the same firsthand, personal way. 1 Corinthians 2, The Message
Rely on Me. He is there. He is always there.
I shared in the past about my preschool class and the special and challenging children that make up my eight kids. We have four girls and four boys, and every day I’m relying on HIM. Without prayer and the Spirit I could not do the job that I do. I need HIM for peace, love, patience, and discipline. I’m learning how to use love and logic to direct our little ones.
My assistant is helpful too. She brings twenty more years of wisdom in teaching and in life to our classroom. Sadly, she is away today and Monday for a funeral out of state. I’m lifting prayers today that I am able to mesh with the substitute in my room with me. I pray she goes with the flow and helps our kids as best as she and we can.
Prayer is powerful. I believe in it. I have seen it work. I rely on prayer.
Today at 7:30 a.m. EST I’ll be praying with the other special education teachers that wish to lift up their day, their students, and their teaching to Him. I’m looking forward to it. It can’t hurt! It can only help me and us. We can rely on Him to work the miracles.
Dear God,
You are always there to rely on. Thanks for your steadiness and constant source of love and care. Forgive me when I forget to come to you first. Give me eyes to see, a heart to feel, and a mind to think about You and Your will for me and for others. Thanks for all of your guidance thus far as I teach my first year in this role. Give us a good year. Help me to rely on you everyday in and outside of work.
Amen.
This has been a Five Minute Friday Post. Key Word “RELY.”
Cheers from my pumpkin foam, cinnamon sprinkled, chai tea latte at home,
Jennifer K Cook 