No one would call the Fresh Fire team sports fanatics—except Chaplain Beverly Rhoden. She’s a ride-or-die Knicks fan. Chaplain Barbara Bailey, Nadirah Fareed, and I can usually take it or leave it.
But this year, during the last four games of the NBA Finals, something changed.
Maybe it was the electric buzz all over New York City. Suddenly, the whole city felt like one big, loud family reunion. My cousins Corine and Betty and I became temporary Knicks fans. On the street, in the stores, on the train—people were talking about the game whether they knew basketball or not. And yes, so were we. It was a party.
Those games took our blood pressure and sanity on a roller coaster. Yet one moment really stuck with me. Knicks player Mitchell Robinson, playing with one good hand, committed a flagrant foul on the Spurs’ star Victor Wembanyama (Wemby). Wemby slid to the floor laughing, pointed to his own head, and said to Robinson: “I’m in your head.”
Translation: “I’m taking up so much space in your mind that you can’t think straight.”
That might sound like trash talk, but the idea of who’s “in your head” is deeply biblical.
In the Garden, the serpent got into Adam and Eve’s heads, pushing God’s clear instruction to the back. In the wilderness, the Israelites kept giving mental real estate to Egypt, romanticizing the very place God had delivered them from. Nicodemus struggled to receive Jesus’ teaching on being “born again” because his old understanding had locked down his mind.
So Paul writes, “Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus…” (Philippians 2:5). In today’s language: Guard who gets to live in your head. Make sure it’s Jesus who saturates your thoughts, desires, decisions, and actions.
When Jesus is in your head, you can recognize what—and who—is not from Him. You gain strength, clarity, and the power to endure.
From one lifelong Knicks fan (Chap. Beverly) and three short-term, bandwagon Knicks fans (Corine, Betty, and Pastor Janice): be careful whose voice you let rattle around in your mind.
Life isn’t a quick slam dunk. It’s about who endures to the final second.
Keep Jesus in the priority seat in your head—and you will not miss the real trophy.
God bless you!
Pastor Janice Fareed-Hardy
