Being a middle school teacher naturally brings a great many oddities and strange comments to my classroom. Middle schoolers are unique (yet amazingly lovely) creatures. What makes them laugh often makes little sense to me. What they find as a “normal comment” often makes me raise my eyebrows or give one of my well known “what?” faces. Walking into the middle of a conversation can often leave me with nothing to do but keep on walking and laugh internally. On the rare occasion, a comment will catch me off guard enough that I do LOL (laugh out loud for those of you not fluent in texting code) or leave me so stunned that I will actually let my “what?” leave my brain and slip out of my mouth.

This past spring this comment entered my classroom. “Why is there a dinosaur in the hallway?” This did earn my attention enough to garner a verbal response. “A dinosaur in the hallway?”

After a short amount of research and a quick email to a friend, we found that there truly was a dinosaur walking through the high school hallway.

Winter Carnival Week.

My friend was kind enough to snap a quick picture for me and the dinosaur (a former student) gave permission for me to use him as the subject of a future blog post.

What strikes me as important from the day the dinosaur walked the hallways is the obviousness of it. A dinosaur is hard to miss. A dinosaur is strange enough to get our attention. A dinosaur is not something easily forgotten. A dinosaur is something that makes us stop to ask “why”.

We often have “dinosaurs” in our spiritual life? Things that come into our faith view that are odd enough to get our attention and force us to start to ask questions. Things that we simply can not miss. Things that get a response almost immediately.

This leads me to think how often there are items in our faith walk that need our attention but they are not as bold and obvious as the dinosaurs. When this dinosaur visited our school for winter carnival week there was an entire group of additional characters that made their way through the halls that day. My students may have noticed them but did not mention them. We did not research why they were here. They were not as obvious.

Our walk of faith is one that requires a daily observation of what is happening around us and who or what might be entering our picture. These observations need to be focused and diligent otherwise we miss the “non-dinosaurs”. These things might come in the form of a person that we meet in the aisle at the store, a student that walks in without anything to say, or our own personal tendency to walk in a spiritual rut.

Take some time to reflect. What are the spiritual dinosaurs in your life today? Which things need your immediate response and attention? Also- what are your spiritual non-dinosaurs? The things that might have slipped by for several days because they are not as obvious. Both need your attention.

“And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.”- Romans 12:2 (KJV)