Setting the Right Pace for the School Year

BY ROY GRIFFITH

It’s official–the school year is well underway. Shorter daylight hours and earlier bedtimes are now the rule of life, along with new friends, new teachers, and new things to learn. The slower pace of summer has given way to a repeating regimen of alarm clocks, carpools, task lists, packed lunches, homework, and that much-welcomed head-on-pillow moment at the end of each day.

Returning to the “dailies” of back-to-school life has one spiritual benefit for both students and adults: It creates a perfect opportunity to test how well we are truly abiding in Christ. There’s nothing better than a well-oiled routine to tempt us into striving in our own strength, and before we know it, we find that we have let go of the Vine. The result? Our hearts dry out and the fruits of our labor sour and shrivel.

This is true for students as well as adults. If you notice that a student’s next Latin quiz is a source of inordinate anxiety or that a speech deadline is growing into a mountain too steep to climb, examine their vine. If the novel for Lit class is a job rather than a joy or math homework is settling into a nightly wrestling match, take time to examine the root. Too easily, our yokes become uneasy and our burdens seem too heavy to bear.

All the while, Jesus bids us to find peace and flourishing by abiding in the Vine. But what does “abiding in the vine” even mean? It’s an abstract metaphor for adults, much less for children. How can we live this out as faithful disciples of Christ in the tangle of the school year?

Calibrate Your Speed

One way to stay connected to Christ in the day-to-day is to calibrate your speed. Think about it this way: Delicious fruits and vegetables can only grow at the speed which God designed. Tomatoes take 20-30 days to germinate, grow, and fully form from the blossom, and then the fruit takes another 20-30 days to ripen. This means seedlings planted in early May won’t have fruit ready to slice for your summertime cheeseburger from the grill until the Fourth of July.

God has hardwired the speed at which tomatoes ripen on the vine, and we should challenge our children and ourselves to think the same way about any activity which is lived in the vine of Christ. If we want to abide with Jesus, we need to match His providential pace. The book of Galatians calls this “keeping in step” with Him.

How can we apply this to the school year? When subjects like math or reading require daily practice, remind your children that God made these subjects such that they take time and repetition to master. Slowness is not abnormal! Resolve to learn them at His pace so that He can take part in the work with you. When your child sits down for nightly homework, ask the Lord to light the path—God wants to answer that prayer, and He is faithful to do it.

Another good example of this slow ripening is in art. When young art students learn to draw, the teacher reminds them to move their eyes carefully and “draw what they see.” The process begins with observing what the Lord has created and moves on to emulating reality on paper. If you skip the observation and jump to drawing, you miss the myriad of details that God has included in the object and the opportunity to develop a capacity for keen observation. I guarantee that cultivating a slow pace for observation, even through sketching, will make students better scientists, better theologians, and better problem solvers, not to mention better listeners in important conversations.

Shift Gears

This does not mean, however, that God intends everything to be done at a horse-and-buggy pace. He makes different tasks to be done at different speeds. Athletes on the soccer field race to get the ball before the opponent, and the God who makes lightning flash and horses gallop cheers them on. But the pace of a soccer game is not the same as the pace for emptying the trash after dinner. The point is not to be fast or slow at everything but to be students of His pace in our different activities.

Keeping in step with Christ, therefore, means the ability to shift gears. Most students know how to rush about to get ready for school in the morning. What’s less natural is learning the discipline to set aside five minutes or more to open the Bible and downshift to the speed Jesus set
for humans to read with contemplation.

Godspeed

To put it another way, we begin to abide in Christ when we learn to do things at Godspeed. Godspeed is an archaic blessing of farewell that comes from the Middle English phrase God spede you (“God prosper you”). It is a direct nod to the New Testament idea that a prosperous life is one lived in the Vine.

One of the best pictures of this is when a varsity cross-country runner takes on the assignment of setting the pace for a novice at practice. In generous humility, the fastest runner on the team comes alongside the slowest, running slightly above the lagging runner’s pace to lend guidance, hope, and the will to finish. Instead of quitting, the novice runner will keep in step with a champion.

Isn’t abiding in the Vine just that? As we trust Christ enough to match our pace to His, He promises to come alongside and patiently lead us to a faithful finish. And when we do so, we often find more fruit than we had ever imagined. Godspeed!

“God has hardwired the speed at which tomatoes ripen on the vine, and we should challenge our children and ourselves to think the same way about any activity which is lived in the vine of Christ.”

 

ROY GRIFFITH is Headmaster at Rockbridge Academy(Crownsville, MD).