My Sunday School teacher when I was seven was Missionary Hyacinth Stubbs, a strong Black woman with the energy of a thousand rhinos packed into a motherly frame. Her rounded face and chubby cheeks were punctuated by a radiant, upturned smile. She didn’t walk. She bounced, rocking toward her destination, often on her tiptoes, as if the ground itself was optional. She combusted into song without warning, like her soul was a bubble machine permanently set to joy.
She grabbed cheeks. She rubbed backs and heads. In a world already divided by unspoken class lines and subtle subcultures, even within the church, she saw none of that. She saw no favorites. She exercised no parental power. She saw a child to be loved. And children read that kind of truth more accurately than Richter scales read earthquakes.
Children remember.
I remember the benches, three or four of us crammed together. I remember being called to the front of the room to dance, to sing, to dramatize Scripture. I remember feeling safe enough to be loud, foolish, expressive. Good teachers don’t just teach lessons. They authorize becoming. Good teachers create great teachers.
It was with her that I first encountered the story of Joshua.
Lately, I’ve found myself at odds with the world, trying to understand it, trying to survive it. I turned, as many of us do, to psychology and philosophy as tools to cope, to comprehend, to name what feels overwhelming. And those tools have their place. But this morning, after prayer and a little lethargy, I heard Missionary Stubbs’ voice clearly, singing.
And I realized something.
God had already taught me so much.
So much that even at seven years old, my thirty-three-year-old self could return and find hope again in the Word.
It is a quiet mercy to realize that an early Christian education often builds something sturdier than information. It builds resilience. Long before we learn the language of therapy or neuroscience, Scripture trains the nervous system to recognize hope.
When Joshua and Caleb are sent to scout the land of Canaan with ten others, the text gives us no clinical vocabulary, only an account (Numbers 13–14). The same land. The same facts. The same dangers. Yet two radically different inner worlds emerge. Ten see giants and feel small. Two see promise and remember God. Scripture does not pause to explain why. It simply shows us what happens when fear becomes the lens through which reality is interpreted.
Joshua and Caleb do not deny the obstacles. They deny the authority of fear. “If the Lord delights in us, He will bring us into this land” (Numbers 14:8). That sentence is not optimism. It is orientation. Their attention is fixed not on threat, but on covenant.
Modern language would call this the difference between a threat-dominant nervous system and a meaning-oriented one. Psychology now tells us what Scripture has long demonstrated. The brain becomes efficient at what it repeatedly attends to. Fear sharpens fear. Hope sharpens hope.
This is where I find myself thinking not in terms of faith versus fear or growth versus fixed mindset, but in the newer language of triggers and glimmers.
Most of us know triggers well. Triggers are moments that activate anxiety, shame, or hypervigilance. They pull us backward, often without permission. Trauma research describes them as cues that signal danger, even when danger is no longer present. Scripture names this too. “They forgot His works” (Psalm 106:13). Forgetting is not intellectual. It is physiological.
But fewer people know the word glimmer.
A glimmer is the opposite of a trigger. It is a small moment, often ordinary, that signals safety, goodness, or meaning. A shaft of morning light. A remembered promise. A verse rising unannounced to the surface of the mind. “Your word was a lamp to my feet” (Psalm 119:105). Lamps are not floods. They are glimmers.
Neuroscience tells us that when we intentionally notice these moments, we strengthen neural pathways associated with calm, gratitude, and resilience. The brain, remarkably obedient, begins to look for them. “Whatever is true, whatever is honorable… think on these things” (Philippians 4:8). Paul is not being poetic. He is prescribing attention.
Philosophically, this aligns with the ancient insight of Stoicism and Augustine alike. We are not shaped most by what happens to us, but by what we consent to internally. Augustine writes in Confessions that the soul becomes restless when it loves the wrong things in the wrong order. Glimmers reorder love. They retrain desire.
Joshua and Caleb, in this sense, were men fluent in glimmers. They remembered Egypt, yes, but they remembered deliverance more. They had trained their attention on God’s past faithfulness, so when fear arrived, it found no permanent lodging.
Once you train your mind and your spirit to watch for glimmers, they multiply. Not because life suddenly becomes easier, but because perception becomes truer. “Taste and see that the Lord is good” (Psalm 34:8). Tasting is active. Seeing is learned.
This is resilience. Not denial of giants, but recognition of grace. Not the absence of fear, but the presence of memory. And sometimes, the smallest glimmer, a remembered verse, a quiet peace, is enough to steady an entire generation.
And if that is true, then Missionary Hyacinth Stubbs was never just teaching children.
She was planting memory. She was training attention. She was building refuge long before we had words for it. Long before the storms came. Long before we needed language for survival.
She sang hope into us.
She let us move.
She let us be seen.
And decades later, when the world grows loud and heavy, her voice still finds us.
Children remember.
And some teachers, by the grace of God, are never finished teaching.