Wednesday, May 30, 2018

New Direction!


I'm not sure what's trending in middle school girl world now but these guys are old news! This is from August 24, 2014.


This week in all five of my classes we discussed the meaning of the words prequel and sequel. We did so in the context of the New Testament books of Luke and Acts. Basically, a prequel is part 1 and a sequel part 2. So, Luke is the prequel to Acts and Acts is the sequel to Luke. See? If you were in my classes, you would (hopefully) understand! I said that to say this: tonight's entry is a sequel. The funny thing is there was a thirty month gap between part 1 and part 2. But it's about girls and girls never change..... until they do.

There was big news in Houston last Friday! It wasn't NASA/Space Center news or the oil business or a visit by the pope. No, it was much bigger- One Direction came to town! The five man put-together boy band from England/Ireland which has captured the hearts of young ladies the world over performed at Reliant Stadium forty-eight hours ago and thousands upon thousands of pre-teens and and teens and their folks filled the mammoth arena. In fact, one of the lead stories on the news was the health of the girls who got in line very early on a very hot day. It would take more than a heat stroke to keep them from screaming and crying over their idols! Two of my players, Lizeth and Sydney, were there, with Sydney's mom acting as chaperone-in-chief. They were so excited! Sydney, who does her nails in a manner that Da Vinci would envy almost as often as I eat supper, did a special painting just for the concert! The concert even came up in class this past week. We were talking about arranged marriages as perhaps Joseph's and Mary's was, and I asked Lizeth if she wanted her parents to arrange a marriage for her. Her response?
"NO!!!!!!!!"
So I changed the question: "Well, what if it were Harry or Niall?" (For the uniformed, those are the two band members girls seem to believe the cutest.) Lizeth's new answer, filtered through the lens of 1D as they are commonly initialized?
"MAYBE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
I'm sure I will hear all about it tomorrow!


In the first paragraph, I told you this was a sequel so I guess I need to get around to the prequel part. You see, I had another student in my classes on Friday with some One Direction history. On March 12, 2012, I penned a devotional on this site called One Way! It centered on one of my 8th graders that year, Kaitlyn, whose obsession with One Direction far surpassed that of Sydney and Lizeth and any other middle schooler currently enrolled. I'm not saying that's all she talked about but............................ (If you are interested, click here: http://stevehawley.blogspot.com/2012/03/one-way.html) But now, Kaitlyn is a junior in my Gospels class and was unimpressed with the hoopla with her former heartthrobs. I even asked her if she would go to the concert if she had free tickets- she would not. You know, she still looks like Kaitlyn but something has really changed since she was in 8th grade!!!

What happened to Kaitlyn? Almost three years, that's what. She's growing up; she's serious about school and college and career and my guess is that a crush on a boy band does not move her dreams down the track. Some of you ladies reading tonight might have had the same feelings for New Kids or NSYNC, for Leif Garrett of David Cassidy, or etc. etc. It's called maturing. We do it physically, we do it academically, we do it socially. We should do it spiritually but that one's trickier. We grow in our faith but sometimes we slip back. We make strides in our prayer and study life but then we get busy. We try to witness to others but we get discouraged. The writer of Hebrews likened a stunted spiritual development to the difference between edification by milk versus solid food. I kid you not- sometimes  I feel like I'm back on the baby diet. It will be interesting to see how Sydney and Lizeth feel about their favorite group when they are one year from graduation. I never thought Kaitlyn would grow out of it! But Kaitlyn gives me hope. She knows what she needs to do to get where she needs to go. And she's heading in the right direction. (Sorry- couldn't resist!) 

Applicable quote of the day:
"Feel free to insult me, but you don’t have the right to insult our fans."
Louis Tomlinson (One Direction
)

God bless,
Steve
Luke 18:1

www.hawleybooks.com
E-mail me at steve@hawleybooks.com

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