I'm just going to separate myself now.

As I've said many times before, and am sure to say many more times in the future....I just love teaching the 4s and 5s class at church.  That age group is just so much fun. 

Today as we gathered around to begin the lesson on the wise men, two boys in particular were being rather rowdy.  After asking them a few times to settle down without success, I used the tried and true "Excuse me boys. Do I need to separate you two so we can have our lesson?"  And right away, the one little boy picked up his chair and said to me "I think I'm just going to go ahead and separate myself now." And took his chair to the end of the row to move away from the temptation of goofing off with his buddy during our lesson time.

So I told him thank you and what a good idea it was to move if he thought he wouldn't be able to pay attention sitting by his friend. We moved on with the lesson and all was well.

But as I was retelling the story at lunch today, it got me thinking.  This little boy knew there was going to continue to be problems if he stayed where he was.  He knew I would have to keep scolding him and that he wouldn't pay attention or learn from today's lesson.  So instead of sitting there waiting for temptation to come again, he removed himself from the scene and went to some place where he knew he would be able to pay attention and not get into trouble.

Do we do that? How often do we know that we are in a place of temptation, in a place where we know we are going to get ourselves into trouble, yet we remain there and basically set ourselves up for defeat? How often do we stay in relationships that are wrong for us, continue with behaviors that aren't good for us, go places where we shouldn't be, knowing the whole time that it's only going to end badly?

As soon as we know there's a problem, we should "just go ahead and separate ourselves now."  I think we can all learn a lesson from this little guy and his smart move. The next time we are in a situation where we know we are going to fall prey to temptation, we need to just go ahead and separate ourselves, move away, and get to a safer place.

Here's to continuing to learn life lessons from random interactions with children.

-AA