I made a connection with my New Orleans teaching experience and the priest's homily on the scripture today. The connection was on the idea of letting negativity get to you and losing your cool when you try so hard not too.
It's hard to teach kids that have a tough life. It's very easy for a hot-tempered French heritage person like myself to lose my temper a little. But I remind myself that these kids have a lot of experiences of anger at home, so if I yell, it does little to change their lives for the better.
Luckily, they are much different from the students I taught before in a poor situation, in that those children lived in a constant trauma state of being. The kids I teach now are a little better off, but still willing to fight over the smallest thing. But I like their fire and grit and spice. They love big and they live big.
Christ calls out in the gospel to love the children as the first among us. I cannot compare myself to Christ in any way, and that is not what this article is about. It is about the need to keep your cool in difficult times. Especially when you have experienced pain or aggravation, your brain gets a little mushy and you forget to be your best self.
I hate loosing my temper and I haven't done so in years. I dislike arguing to the point of just not talking about the argument till I have gone to adoration or prayed about it. But you can't always make it to adoration when your working or you have other little people to watch over.
The important thing to remember is that Jesus Christ gives the grace you need for today. I loved in the Magnificat, how the reflection discussed the 'lack of knowledge' of the called disciples. How they would be the last ones you would think, would be picked to inspire a new way of thinking: to love fellow men as yourself. They were given, as we are given, grace enough for the moment.
The comparison of ourselves and the disciples is that we still live amidst other people. Children and adults that have souls longing to know Christ.
I can't say I haven't screwed up and talked too loud to them, because I have. But I can keep trying to hold myself accountable to what Christ calls of me.
