Deep Thought: If you are ever stuck in some thick undergrowth, in your underwear, don’t start thinking of what other words have “under” in them, because that’s probably the first sign of jungle madness.

I think I had jungle madness when, in Monday’s post, I said I would continue the story the next day. What was I thinking? I can barely blog once a week, let alone once a day.

Anyway, we were having a discipline problem in kids church after Alan, a member of the church who owned a bus, started bringing in kids from the local housing projects. They had no relationship with me and, to them, I was equivalent to the cafeteria lady or the PE coach. (Because those who can’t do - teach; and those who can’t teach - teach PE). What were we going to do? We didn’t want to reject these kids, but at the same time, we had church families keeping their kids out of kids church because of the riots and gang warfare. Not a good tool to get visitors to come back a 2nd time when their child was in a knife fight after the flannel graph lesson.

One evening while visiting my mom (she had HBO), I watched the movie starring Michelle Pfeiffer, Dangerous Minds.  In the movie, Michelle, who played a high school teacher in a predominately black school in Los Angeles, also struggled with behavioral problems. A light bulb went on in my head when in one scene, she visited some of her students in their homes in the housing projects, not because they were in trouble, but because she wanted to let the mothers of these kids know just how wonderful they were. When she did this, the students began to rise up to the level of her belief in them. In the meantime, not only did the students’ grades go up, but the behavior problems disappeared.

You’ll have to findout in my next post what we were inspired to do after watching this movie. In the meantime, you must understand that I must get out of my underwear and go take a bath so as to immerse myself underwater so as not to be under worked or under appreciated at work.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 26th, 2009 at 8:49 am and is filed under Pastor Eric. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.