My Life Monday - Monsters In My Room

Original Picture from Little White Lion

Let's talk about health through creative genius.  Not my creative genius persae', but parents do have to become creative to help their children in a number of different situations.  With kids we face all types of obstacles in keeping them mentally and emotionally healthy on all fronts.  Sure, we can feed them and bathe them and guard what goes in their little minds, but they still live in this world and will pick things up from outside sources.  I tend to find that during some of these situations frustration can run on high and during those moments of frustration my creative juices simply STOP flowing!  Ugg.  I want to always be gentle and loving and communicate well, but let's face it, sometimes I DON'T.

So today I wanted to give you one such example that maybe you can use with your kids, grand kids, nieces, nephews or other children in your life.  The dreaded, "There's a monster under my bed" or in my closet or wherever monsters may lurk at night.  I was naive to think we would never face this issue because we don't watch monsters on TV or even talk about them, but BAM, about a year ago, out of nowhere there were monsters!  In her closet!  My then, barely 4 year old, would suddenly not go into her room alone in the dark.  She didn't want to go to sleep.  And at this point after about a week of telling her everything was alright and praying over her and singing worship music over her to fall asleep (which we already do every night) I started to get frustrated.  Can't I just demand she not be scared and make her go to bed?  No.  How do we defeat these monsters?  Where did they come from?  We need to move beyond this fear.  After all, "God has not given us a spirit of Fear, but He has given us a spirit of Power, a spirit of Love and of a Sound Mind."  2 Timothy 1:7. 

Step 1: Pray.  Pray against the spirit of Fear; after all, it is a spirit and can MUST be defeated.  So, we prayed.  We prayed the scripture above in 2 Timothy, but I also like the scripture Psalm 91, the entire chapter.  I read and pray this over my kids often.

Step 2: Get Creative.  Remember those creative juices I was talking about?  The ones that seem to stop flowing during difficult situation?  Yeah, get those going!  I remembered my own 'monsters under the bed' issue when I was a kid, but I didn't think they were monsters...I thought they were demons!  And I still think they were, but that is another story for another time.  Back then my mom gave me a metal baseball bat and I wrote 'SWORD OF THE SPIRIT, Ephesians 6:17' on it in permanent marker, then I prayed over it and set it next to my bed.  It gave me great comfort to have a physical reminder of the spiritual weapons from the Lord within arms reach.  So I did this with my little girl.  Amazing what a physical, tangible reminder can do to calm the mind.  And finally, I wanted to show her that Mommy was doing something on her behalf, so I filled a spray bottle with water and some lemon essential oil (for smell) and labeled the bottle Monster Spray.  I ran around her room spraying monsters that she pointed out to me while yelling, "Gotcha!"

The combination of the above things completely remedied the monster issue the very first night.  Of coarse, we did spray some monsters the following few nights just for good measure, but they had all but disappeared.

There are other things our family does on a regular basis to help keep the real monsters away (like anointing our doors and windows and spiritual house cleaning), but on a kid level these things worked!

Have you ever had to be creative in the face of frustration for your kids?  Leave a comment and tell me about it, it could help another family out there.