I’m continuing my “fast” from regular posting to devote this time to my dear wife, who will be leaving this weekend to spend a month in Maine assisting with the birth of our fifth grandchild. During this time I’m bringing back some “old school” Sacred Journey posts you may not have seen the first time around. Today’s is truly “old school,” going back to May 2004 when I was still an administrator at a Christian school in Charlottesville.

Today was “field day” at the PreK-6 school where I am an administrator. Field Day is a day of everyone playing competitive games outside all day and working on their first sunburns of the year. At my school, the sixth graders plan all the games and run the operations of the day.

My job was to spend the morning supervising the eight guys in my sixth grade advisory group as they helped the munchkins play various games. I was really proud of my guys–they can be absolute knuckleheads at times–for the way they handled themselves. They stayed really involved with the kids and helped them to enjoy themselves.

At some point late in the morning, when I was away from my guys for a few minutes taking pictures of the other groups, a fight broke out between two of the boys. I arrived to find them seated by another teacher on separate picnic tables, each glaring in a different direction. When I began to talk with them, the other guys in our group crowded around and started to try to out-shout each other with their color commentary on what had gone down.

Not surprisingly when you take a bunch of pre-adolescents out of the structured classroom and give them wide open spaces under a broiling sun, this was not the only incident of tempers flaring during the morning. What was depressing to me, though, was hearing several teachers griping about how “unworthy” and “ungrateful” these children were and how the day was supposedly ruined. The thought that popped into my head was, “What were you expecting? You’re Christian teachers, after all. Did you really think that these children are all perfect angels? No, quite the opposite! Just like every one of us, they are sinners, enslaved by sin. Their conflicts and petty jealousies are only what comes natural to sinners when the slightest bit of release comes from societal restraints. Why would we expect any different?”

Back at the picnic table, I had gathered all my guys together and we began to hash out what had happened. At first, there were just outbursts of emotional accusations, but soon we began to get to the deeper heart issues that lay behind the behaviors. Before half an hour had passed, several of them were in tears…there was much confession, and perhaps even a little bit of healing.

Now see, the thing is, without the unfamiliar ground of the field day, combined with the pressure cooker of heat and responsibility, these issues might never have surfaced. The fight, rather than one more thing to be annoyed at, became an opening into the souls of some 12-year-old boys. Definitely worth it, in my account books.