Yesterday at Bethel Church we might have had the high attendance of the summer. You get the feeling things are changing. Summers are shorter. They don’t just feel shorter. They are shorter. Schools are starting sooner. Camps are shortening their summer programs. Last week the weather was even cooler, fall-like. Stores are stocked with school supplies. Young families are shopping for back-to-school school clothes.
In our neck of the woods school starts this week.
Lois and I raised eight children without ever sending them off to school. If we had it to do over again, we would do it all over again in a heartbeat. We would try hard to do it better, but we would absolutely do it again. We liked not being driven by the school schedule. Monday was my day off and every Monday was a field trip or family time.
Still in our neighborhoods there was a difference once school started you could feel in the air in our little town. Things just felt more businesslike—more academic. No cluster of kids out under the streetlight. No children riding bikes out in front of the house. The trampoline sat silently in the back yard. No sound of clacking skateboards. A burst of traffic around 3:30 p.m. but by early in the evening the streets grew quiet and empty.
Home-schooling is not for everyone, of course. But learning together at home happens in every family. Of our 20 grandchildren, some of them are in public schools, some in Christian schools, some of them are taught at home.
For all of them we pray that above every other thing they come to know and love God with all their heart, soul, mind, and strength.
“You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.” (Deuteronomy 6:5, ESV)
Yesterday I needed to pick something up at the store. I noticed huge school supply displays and fall clothes for little children. A woman and her about 12-year-old daughter were having a serious conversation about notebooks. The little girl had a look of concern on her face. I was just a stranger walking by, but if I am any judge of the human countenance it was a look of anxiety.
It made my soul prayerful for all the little ones going out in this big, scary world of opportunity and danger, knowledge and adventure and delight, friends and foes.
Oh. God. Watch over each of them wherever they go. Help them learn and grow and flourish. Give them grace and mercy. Help each teacher and school worker and bus-driver and lunch-room helper and teacher’s aide to do their part to guide each young soul well.
For the children, the carefree days of summer are gone and soon, too their childhood will pass and they will enter the great steam of adulthood. Prepare them Lord. Protect them. They are little lambs really, all of them, and you are the Good Shepherd.
In a train car in Sugarcreek, Ohio | August 21, 2023
