A week ago my children went back to school. There’s much lamentation these days about the way schools seem to be starting earlier and earlier. In the minds of most students, August is barely a part of what they regard as “summer.”
Well, this summer the Crumplers got a taste of the way it used to be. (I hear it used to be this way – I really don’t know). We didn’t start school until the day after Labor Day. My kids have been back at it now for a full week. This means that we had the entire months of June, July, and August for summer break. It was a great summer, and while it does seem that most schools systems are robbing their students and families of perfectly decent, hot summer days, I have a confession to make. We were ready for the day after Labor Day. I mean . . . really ready. Ready for some routine. All this talk about requiring schools to begin the school year after Labor Day sounds great until it gets to be August 15th or 20th and your children are still roughly a decade away from driving a car.
But we made it. And now we’re a week into the school year and starting to feel the weekly rhythms.
Since my kids are at a new school this year, Marnie and I have had plenty to be prayerful about. We’ve prayed for a smooth transition, for new friends, for teachers who will connect well with them and thus teach them well, for their sense of competence in the work required of them. But sitting here on a Tuesday morning, having just dropped them off at car pool about an hour ago, I’m thinking about wisdom. For me, and perhaps for most parents, this is the prayer above all prayers. I want my kids to gain wisdom. In his introduction to the book of Proverbs in The Message, Eugene Peterson offers this definition of wisdom:
Wisdom has to do with becoming skillful in honoring our parents and raising our children, handling our money and conducting our sexual lives, going to work and exercising leadership, using words well and treating friends kindly, eating and drinking healthily, cultivating emotions within ourselves and attitudes toward others that make for peace. Threaded through all these items is the insistence that the way we think of and respond to God is the most practical thing we do.
Accordingly, Peterson renders Proverbs 1:7 as follows:
Start with God – the first step in learning is bowing down to God; only fools thumb their noses at such wisdom and learning.
I want my children to make good grades, but more than that I want them to make good decisions. That may not seem like such an urgent matter when you’re talking about a first grader and a second grader. The weight of decision making sits light upon them these days. But their capacity to bear the weight later, when the stakes are higher, is being formed right now.
And here’s what’s truly unsettling about all of this. There’s nothing in the book of Proverbs (as far as I can tell) to suggest that wisdom will come from some kind of educational institution. Schools have role in cultivating and teaching wisdom, but they can’t be looked to as the source of wisdom. Scripture seems to assume that wisdom is gained and passed on in the context of relationship. Wisdom’s natural habitat is personal, not institutional. Throughout Proverbs there is the sound of teaching that takes place from parent to child, one on one. Wisdom isn’t gained by reading as often as it is by conversation. “Pay close attention friend to what your father tells you; never forget what you learned on your mother’s knee” (Prov. 1:8, The Message). If my kids are to gain wisdom, it’s up to Marnie and me.
That’s an amazing thing to ponder. As I do, it becomes clear to me that as this school year begins I need to do more than pray for my children. I need to pray for myself. I need to pray for something to pass on to them. I need to pray for wisdom.
If any of you lacks wisdom he should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to him (James 1:5 NIV).
I’m counting on that.
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