Don't Forget this Important Back to School Item
Unfortunately, a new item has been on more and more parents’ shopping lists this year: bulletproof backpacks. The too-numerous school shootings in recent years punctuated by the recent shootings in Dayton and El Paso have only reinforced demand for child-sized body armor. It is a sad commentary on American life that we would rather use active shooter drills to teach our children how to minimize casualties or equip our children with body armor than to ban assault weapons and high capacity magazines and/or institute universal and comprehensive background checks.
The reality is that our children are facing issues we didn’t while we were growing up. In addition to the proliferation of gun violence driven by domestic terrorism, they face a planet increasingly destabilized by climate change, skyrocketing costs for the higher education that they require to enter an uncertain economy, and a healthcare system that is almost unaffordable to all but the wealthiest.
Parents want to prepare their children as best they can for this rapidly changing and increasingly hostile world. We sign them up for and encourage their participation in organized sports to teach them the value of physical exercise and teamwork. We push them to participate in extracurricular activities like Boy and Girl Scouts, music and art lessons, school clubs, and community service organizations to help them round out their personalities and college applications. We want them to have friends, so we set up playdates and drive them to meet their friends for movies and games. We do this because we want them to be prepared and healthy individuals.
All of this is important to our children's development but a key question we need to ask during this back to school season is this: What are we doing to nurture our children’s souls and teach them how to care for the part of themselves that endures to eternity? The truth is that their soul is the one constant that stays with them as they grow up, graduate high school, go to college, enter the workforce, meet their spouse, start a family, and change jobs several times. It will be with them as they experience their own healthcare crises and care for their parents (us) in their old age. It will be with them as they take leadership of our economy’s businesses, our society’s institutions, try to solve the problems that prior generations bequeathed to them, and tackle the new issues that will emerge in their lifetimes.
At some point, their education will become dated and, unless they have learned how to teach themselves new skills and knowledge, it will begin to fail them. Their bodies will get older and will no longer perform with the peak athletic performance that allows them to dazzle their peers. The hard truth is that some of things that we consider most important deteriorate over time, and the best we can do is slow that decline. Our children may not yet realize this, but one day will hit them. Life is hard and it will batter and bruise us and wear us down.
However, their soul and their relationship with the God is what abides throughout all these changes. Indeed, it is their spirituality and relationship with God that can best sustain them as they endure the storms and crises of this life. So what are we doing to promote the spiritual development of our children? What are we doing to connect them with a strength and love that can help them survive all the challenges of life and thrive in the midst of it all?
As we enter the hectic pace of the fall school schedule, let us not only worry about school supplies and clothes, practices schedules and club meetings. Let us also encourage our children to invest their time and energy into a relationship with a God whose love can sustain them through the best and worst that this life will throw at them. We can give them no better gift than a deep and abiding relationship with the God who loves them and will always be with them.
Grace and Peace,
Pastor John