Children

Wednesday, October 30, 2024

(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)

Children

Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right.

Parents, do not provoke your children to anger but bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord.

On the first day of the week we joined two hundred other grandparents to visit classes at Austin Classical School, after attending the school chapel service. Margaret visited Jasper’s kindergarten. Miles invited me to his second-grade class. At the chapel, school principal Katie talked about the joy she felt when she realized her own kids could get a classical education, which would include gentle grounding in verses like those in Ephesians 6 above.

The kindergartners are memorizing chapter 3 of Proverbs. Miles’ class is studying the history of Rome and creating various art projects (in his mother Andi’s art class) that bind this period of history to his eyes and hands. In the Monday assembly I saw many of the students I helped supervise in the school chess club last year. The school’s 9^th grade traveled to San Antonio on Tuesday to perform one act of a Shakespeare play. In Latin.

These kids are just like other kids, Miles and Jasper included. But what Katie said she loved from the beginning, long before she was the school administrator, was how the messages at home matched the messages coming home from school, rather than collapsing in contradiction. Margaret, a teacher all her life, has often said when kids get the same message from three sources, the message sticks. Respecting parents and expecting respect from parents are just such messages.

Know that both children and parents have a Master in heaven, and with him there is no partiality. Let them speak always of the glory of your Kingdom and proclaim ceaselessly the righteousness of your mighty power.

Remember the words of Kahlil Gibran in his wisdom masterpiece The Prophet, published a hundred years ago.

And a woman who held a babe against her bosom said, Speak to us of Children.

     And he said:

     Your children are not your children.

     They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.

     They come through you but not from you,

     And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

 

     You may give them your love but not your thoughts,

     For they have their own thoughts.

     You may house their bodies but not their souls,

     For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.

     You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.

     For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday …

 

 

     You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.

     The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,

and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.

     Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;

     For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.

Each of us is born and grows day by day into who we’ve been made to be. Our lives on earth might be short or long, filled with peace and with pain. In the education provided for us by God on earth, we reclaim our right to suffer, even as we sing our endless songs of joy.

Strive to enter through the narrow gate.

Jesus’ words point us and all our children toward that gate.

Behold, some are last who will be first, and some are first who will be last.

(Ephesians 6, Psalm 145, 2 Thessalonians 2, Luke 13)

(posted at www.davesandel.net)

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