As brand new boxes of crayons, tablets and colorful folders take front and center in stores, the excitement of new beginnings catches on, and parents begin shopping for book bags and blunt scissors and school shoes, eager to fully prepare their children for the approaching school year.
But for parents and kids alike, new situations also can produce new anxieties, and the most important preparation for every family member is prayer.
Whether our kids attend public, private, or parochial school, or we teach them at home, we need to remember that God has not given us a spirit of fear, but has in fact called us to take His message of redemption and hope to our neighbors and communities.
Discuss with your kids their individual roles, and your role as a family, in showing the love of Jesus. Let your children express their hopes and anxieties about the upcoming year. Talk about the needs you are aware of in your school and community.
Then, as a family, begin to pray for your elementary, middle and high schools. Pray for administrators, teachers, students and their families. Ask for God’s protection, His grace, His blessing, and pray that His truth will be evident in every class, and His love be revealed to the entire community. Even if you are active home schoolers, we would encourage you to make it a family project to pray regularly for your public schools.
An engaging, meaningful object lesson that will help your children visualize the effect of their prayers would be to read the story of Jericho in Chapter 6 of Joshua, and then in the evening walk the perimeter of your school, each family member silently praying for all who are connected with it, and for your own family’s interactions there. While it is certainly true that God will hear your prayers wherever you are, that mental picture can encourage your kids as they go through the blessings and challenges of the coming school year.
Make it a point this year to keep your prayers for your school and your passion for your neighbors and community as sharp as those bright new crayons, and see what beautiful things God will do in and through your family this school year.
Does anyone ever actually want to be a couch potato?
What is there to inspire or motivate us about a slovenly, overweight, crumb-covered, do-nothing, sitting around all day, stuffing all kinds of junk food, mindlessly flipping channels?
The food may be momentarily entertaining, but it serves only to slow him down, and there might occasionally be something worth watching on TV, but the constant channel surfing guarantees that she will never have a thought of her own.
There’s nothing in that picture that any of us would aspire to.
And yet, for many of us in America today, that is a precise description of what the younger generation sees of our spiritual lives. We should not be at all shocked that a large number of kids who grow up in the church are heading out the door the minute they are 18, never to be heard from again.
We are a bunch of spiritual couch potatoes. Sadly, too many of us are content to sit in our comfortable pews Sunday after Sunday, listening to music and rating it as if we were on “American Bandstand,” and flitting from congregation to congregation because “we’re just not getting fed.”
It’s no wonder that our young people want no part of that.
Paul himself shot down the idea that mature Christians are supposed to be “fed.” He pointed out that babies need to be fed, but adults are supposed to be out hunting and preparing their own meals…and providing for the babies. So, if we are regularly studying and applying truth we find in our Bibles to our own lives, what is it that we should be doing at church?
Like our couch potato who finally goes into the kitchen to prepare himself a nutritious meal, we may find, when we look into the New Testament, that we become energized to actually be the church in this world.
That would mean exercising our spiritual gifts and calling, by getting out of the pew and into our community—feeding the hungry, providing for widows and orphans, protecting the weak, giving to the poor, being friends to the friendless, visiting those who are sick or in prison, demonstrating to them that there is hope because Jesus loves them.
Today’s young adults, whether they are believers or not, have a deep concern about the needs they see in the world around them. Not content to just cluck their tongues and feel sorry, they want to take action. They live green, they volunteer, they raise funds for charities and disaster relief, they travel around the world at their own expense to dig wells and build schools.
They should see the church as a group of people more concerned with giving than getting, people who are responsibly training for spiritual fitness, people who are racing to meet the needs of the world around them with power and compassion, in the name of Jesus.
Let’s get off the spiritual couch, and invite the next generation to join us in running the race, intent on the prize of the high calling of life in Christ Jesus.
