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Back to School

Back to School

Rev. Andrew Paton

Back to school!! Oh No!
I hated going to school. I loved the vacations
and wanted them never to end but they always did!

In South Africa children wear uniforms to attend school. So the play clothes are put away the days before the term begins. The uniforms are brought out. The new shoes are purchased (because everyone knows that vacations make school kids' feet swell.) New teachers to meet. New routines to embrace. New class rooms, new text books, same old yawning. It's the back to school experience.

Oh how I disliked school. Teachers predicted that I would long back to those days. It's been 29 years. They were wrong!! I never want to go back. This isn't helping some of you out there that are reading this. You are about to face this awful ordeal yet another time. My sympathies!

I do admit that when I became a parent I reached a point in the vacations when I longed for the first day of the new semester. You kids know we love you, but there's only so much we can take! Only as a parent did I discover the true usefulness of the school system.

The more I think about it - the thing I hated most about school was school! I loved the friends. I enjoyed the extramural activities. I'm grateful for the education - it's been one of life's greatest gifts to me - but what a grim process by which it was imparted!

To me education is that process that takes place immediately after a pupil asks a teacher a question.

I just never got interested enough in some of the lessons to be curious. My teachers acted as though they knew everything about life. I now know they didn't. There are some things you can't learn there.

School cannot teach you morals - it can only impart facts.

There are more things to learn in life than can be discovered inside a textbook. Learning:

"how to do" mustn't be confused with discovering "why to do".

The Bible calls God's laws "our schoolmaster". There's a dislike of school that is nothing more than a rebellion against boundaries. That is an attitude that produces a fool. If there are none so blind as those who will not see then there are none so stupid as those who will not learn. Carrying a Bible under your arm, even in front of TV cameras won't make you virtuous. So what is this Schoolmaster's curriculum?

Some of us need a back-to-school experience when it comes to the moral laws God has instituted. Our haughty philosophers of this century have claimed that God is dead and with Him have perished the moral restraints imposed by an "others matter" view of life.

Isn't it time you revisited the 10 commandments God gave Moses (Exodus 20) or the Sermon on the Mount by Jesus (Matthew 5) and took a refresher course in life's deeper values?

Do I hear grumbles about all the boundaries that this "course" entails? Some people have become so deluded as to believe the singer of the 1970s who crooned that "freedom was having nothing left to lose".

Return to the school of ethics upon which this nation was built. Take some lessons. Discover again that the true freedom in life is to live within the boundaries of accountability to God and love to others. Go enroll at a place of worship this weekend.