In the busyness and challenge of each day it's understandable that we can come to see difficult students or colleagues as a source of our suffering or unhappiness.

However, what if, all this time, we may have been fighting the wrong enemy?

In this episode I want to suggest that your challenging students or colleagues are not the ones we need to overcome. There is a much greater enemy you need to be aware of.

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Well, Hey everybody, Jonathan Doyle with you.

Once again, welcome back to the Catholic teacher podcast, almost daily as daily

as I can make it, but I just wanted to reach out and just keep the content

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Friends.

I want to talk to you about something.

I was on a call the other day.

To a school in, uh, in north America.

And I'm doing some work with these guys and we were talking about their

experience coming back from COVID and.

A lot of fatigue in the school system.

Right?

A lot of fatigue in the kids, a lot of social disconnections taking

place over the last couple of years.

And I was talking to the principal there and he was telling me, he was

sort of saying, look, we're struggling.

He said, there's just, um, there's tension.

There's a lot of fatigue.

There's.

We're just finding it's, it's really difficult between sometimes

between staff and staff and staff and students, what do we do?

And what I did is I went and ran a half marathon to think about it.

I do in many of, you know, I'm going to, um, exercise, I guess, fanatic the word.

I just love it.

I just went out and, um, and ran a half marathon the other day on my own.

And I was thinking about the question.

And often when I do these long runs, Uh, I sort of get these ideas.

I'm hoping it's the holy spirit and not just the pain.

And, um, And I'm thinking about it and I'm thinking, you

know, what's interesting about.

Behavior management.

Conflict between students and teachers.

Do you know, what's interesting about it is I think we're probably pretty

consistently fighting the Roan.

Enemy.

I was thinking about it.

I was thinking.

As an educator, how easy is it?

And we've all been there over the years.

Think of a particularly difficult student.

Or particularly difficult colleague.

Often when I do that live on stage people sort of laugh nervously.

You know, they're like, oh, I love everybody.

I don't have any problems with the people I work with.

But we all have them, right?

We all have these people that, uh, or students that really ring

our bell and it can get bad.

Right.

I can get, you can have kids that are just really, really hard work.

And we can fall into the trap.

At least I can remember.

I used to where you can actually think that there's, there's a

deep intent that the kid wakes up each day going, you know what?

I can't wait to get to school.

Because I'm going to make my teacher's life miserable.

And we can, we can fall into that trap, right.

I think, uh, at different times, different seasons because at different times in the

teaching journey, You know, we can have.

You know, issues going on in our private lives, we can have health issues.

We can, our energy levels can be at different points.

So sometimes it's gonna be on top of our game sometimes not.

And then we're dealing with difficult people, difficult circumstances.

What do we do?

I think we're fighting the wrong enemy.

I think what we tend to do is we look at this particular colleague or particular

student and they become the enemy.

We think about how we need to manage them, how we need to

deal with them, how we need to.

Control or stop them from doing X behavior.

Now, of course we need discipline.

We need structure in our education spaces and our classrooms so that we can.

Actually impart and teach.

And shape character.

But I think that the enemy is not the one you think it is.

So you're going to Jonathan, what's the big reveal.

Who's the enemy.

I think it's the devil.

I think it's Satan.

I think it's basically that what Satan wants to do.

Well, we know what he wants to do.

It's very clear.

All right.

Throughout scripture, he.

Theologically Satan can never win any ultimate battle.

Right.

And there's a couple of points here.

One is that we often think that.

You know, God is in this cosmic death match with Satan and

we hope the good guys win.

It's nothing to do with that.

One of those things that actually helped me years ago was the realization that

Satan is not God's equal or rival.

Okay.

You've really got to get this deeply.

It's not as if there's God, and then over on the other side of the

dividing line, there's Satan and they're going at it against each other.

You have to remember that Satan was only an angel, a fallen angel.

And he was literally thrown out of heaven by some Michael Wright.

So Satan might be problematic and he is, and he's real, but he got, you know,

He got his butt handed to him by St.

Michael.

I won't be flipping, I don't want to be in delicate, but he just did.

Jesus himself said, I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven.

Well, why did he fall like lightning?

He didn't trip friends.

It wasn't like he was, you know, up on the balcony in heaven and accidentally

slipped on the, you know, on site.

Someone had spilled a daiquiri.

He was removed.

He was thrown out by Michael and it's beautiful because

Michael Mick L Michelle McCamish.

Michelle means who is like, God.

I always loved that.

Always used to preach on that a bit because you know, when there

was war in heaven, Michael's battle cry was who is like, God, he was so

utterly incensed and disk, you know, basically could Michael feel disgusted?

I don't know, but he was so incensed that, that another angelic being

could presume to be like, God,

And that's where the name Michael comes from.

So.

Satan cannot win any ultimate battle.

He is not God's rival.

So what is the game?

Well, the only game is.

If you think of the, you know, tons of in your life when you've

encountered really bitter people, What they want to do is damage, right.

Really bitter, resentful, twisted.

People want to damage other people.

They don't want to, they don't really want to win.

They don't want it to stop.

They just want to cause harm.

And what Satan's plan simply is, is to separate every individual

human soul from God, for eternity, he's in the deprivation game.

He wants to deprive God of souls.

So what happens in the human journey and for our purposes today, the

journey of Catholic education.

Is that the enemy comes in.

Remember the gospel story about the weeds and the wheat and the enemy comes

in and sows weeds throughout the week.

The enemy comes in.

To convince us that the student is the enemy or the colleague is the

enemy, because if the enemy is.

If Satan can do that, then we start to go at each other.

We start to hate each other.

We start to attack each other.

We start to tear each other down.

And that leads to a damage in the Christian community, in the

Catholic education community, in your school community.

And please remember that your school is a unique discreet.

Uh, community in and of itself.

So the more discord, the more weeds that the enemy can.

So in that place, the better for him.

So, what I want you to do is not to discount people's difficult behavior.

Not to discount toxic behaviors.

You've got to deal with things in the real world, right?

So you don't cop abuse.

You don't put up with.

Really toxic behavior use the behavior management systems, but I'm talking

about is a conceptual behavioral shift.

Uh, x-ray conceptual shift that leads to behavioral change.

The conceptual shift is to go, no matter how difficult this student

is, no matter how awful this, uh, colleague may be, they are not my enemy.

They are not my enemy.

I will be like Christ to them.

And trust me, friends.

It's so hard.

That's why we have sacraments.

That's why we have prayer.

Because, because on our own.

Uh, you know, what have we got?

We've got humanism, right?

We've got, let's do the right thing.

Let's try and be nice to each other.

That's humanism.

We're not trying to do that.

We're trying to do something else.

So the challenge we face is simply.

Realizing that the enemy is not the enemy.

There's a different enemy in play.

So as you go through your day-to-day.

Start to notice that colleague that drives you in sane.

Start to notice that student who rings your bell and just start to

say to yourself, Jesus helped me.

I know that this person is not my enemy.

I know that the devil is my enemy.

The devil has a plan for this student.

The devil has a plan for my colleague.

The devil has a plan for me, help me not to participate in it, help me to love

because you know, if you resist the devil, a scripture says he will flee from you.

And he doesn't like love when, when he realizes that he's been seen.

When he realizes that you recognize what he's doing.

You know, the scripture says, stand up to him, firm in the faith, resist

the devil, and he will flee from you.

How do you resist him while you noticed him first, you notice his plan and

then you pray into it and you move always in the opposite direction.

If you feel contempt for a student, try the opposite direction.

Try respect and courtesy and be solicitous of them.

How they going?

And they will look at you like, are you crazy?

Why are you doing this?

Why are you being nice to me?

This is very freaky and it will confuse them.

It's the Jedi mind trick.

So friends move in the opposite direction, seek the grace of the sacraments,

seek prayer, seek the heart of Christ.

It's hard.

It's hard.

It's hard.

That's why so many things in CA in Catholic life or Sacramento,

it's why in family and marriage life it's sacramental because we

can't love each other perfectly.

Without those things, we just don't do it.

You know, depending on our backgrounds and our individual psychology, some

of us do it better than others.

This is endless need for grace.

All right.

That's the message for today.

Fight the right enemy friends.

Fight the right enemy.

All right, God, bless everybody.

Please make sure to subscribe, share this with some teachers, go and check out

these show notes and I'll try and put a link across to the YouTube channel here.

So you can see the YouTube version of this.

But god bless you everybody thank you for what you're doing my name's jonathan doyle

this is the catholic teacher podcast and i'll have another message for you tomorrow