School

I am posting this on the Sunday before school starts here in Pennsylvania.  We have such long winters that we have to squeeze out every iota of summer as long as we can.  In the south, school started mostly last week, but who cares, because you still have weekends of fun for about four more months, then a few months of hoodies, of jackets, for skinny people even coats, but no snow, no salted roadways, no plows at 5:00 a.m. in the eerie glow of daybreak preparing the grids for traffic.

I love school.  I wonder sometimes, in thinking about the Israelites, if we will home-school in the new world.  How will we educate the resurrected?  I don't know.  I just couldn't wait for the first day of first grade, and anytime my parents made me stay home sick, I was sick another way.  I would lie and say I was okay to get to go to school. 

Wasn't just because I wanted out of the house either.  I did want to be away from my house as much as possible, but I wanted to be in school if it was open.  I was pretty much a hermit with two part time jobs as a teenager just because of that.  And I could get lost in a book so easily, so happily. 

Still. 

In Arkansas, a lot of parents chose to home-school their children, and I admire them.  I would never do that.  Supposedly I am more qualified than a lot of people, and I was criticized for not doing this, but I never once even thought about home-schooling.  If it crossed my mind it was accompanied by hysterical laughter.

Are you kidding me? 

The best thing about school was my children had to face the Pledge of Allegiance every day.  During the primaries for a presidential election in 2004, my daughter wrote a position paper on why she voted the theocracy ticket rather than the democratic or republican.  They learned to get along with a variety of people, some nice, some not, and they learned to keep to a schedule and say no to drugs and peer pressure.

The state of Arkansas requires home-schooled children to take a competency test every spring and then to submit notarized scores to the school board as proof of compliance with the law that children must be educated through age 16.  Sadly, some of the members of the congregation were not in compliance with this law.  This was called to the attention of the Circuit Overseer, and in several congregations announcements were made that parents should obey Caesar in this too just like paying taxes.

After that meeting, standing in the back of the hall, an elder stated that in this particular congregation, no effort would be made to insure parents actually did so and parents should be guided by their conscience.

My sadness is overwhelming because I can name five children who can not read above fourth grade level, and they are the same ages as my children.  My fear is in expectation that a reporter will figure this out and the headlines in the paper will read:  Jehovah Witness Cult Children Ignorant

And that is such a reproach.  I am grateful everyday it has not happened.

There is a song we sang a few weeks ago, and I have been listening to it in my head as my subconscious jukebox shuffles my music.  Here is the line:

Oh what love God's son for us showed, when he left his Father's abode
that with men he might live ...

It doesn't say the Christ for us showed, or Jesus, but God's son.  It puts the emphasis both by words and musical accent on the familial relationship between Jehovah and his firstborn son, Jesus.  You know that phrase "only-begotten" son?  It literally means Jehovah begat Jesus in King James' linguistics.  The tense, beget, begat, begotten.

And I had never thought of it quite like the song put it, that it took a lot of love for humans for Jesus to leave his Father's presence.  He was very content being there. 

A Watchtower a few months ago mentioned that Jesus prayed for Jehovah's will to be done, as he was crucified on the stake, for this burden to be lifted from him.  He was not saying I don't want to do this.  He was still willing to die, but he didn't want to die branded as a blasphemer to his Father. 

He wanted no reproach to his Father's name.  He also left us a model to follow closely.  My goal this year is to do all things to reflect well on the name Jehovah's Witnesses.  I'm determined to be nice to everyone, to control my temper and my tongue, and to not reproach my God.