I hope you had a great summer and got to do things you didn’t get to do during the school year. I get to play a little more golf than when school is in session. And, by “more,” I mean I played three times this summer.
If you play golf, I am what is known as a “hacker”—not a golfer in the truest sense, but a weekend warrior who goes out and tries to hit a few good shots. Yet, I always enjoy the feeling I have stepping out onto the first tee box on a summer morning (or any morning), looking out over a beautiful course, my mind and heart filled with promise: maybe today is the day when it all comes together and my game becomes truly transcendent. While I don’t practice enough to make that dream a reality, the feeling remains.
I love the beginning of a new school year because it’s filled with similar promise. It’s the opportunity for a fresh start—new teachers, new friends, and sometimes a new campus. The new year brings the chance for everything to come together and for this to be that transcendent year. While we’re probably wise enough to know there’s no such thing as perfection in a Genesis 3 world, we can do things differently this year. It can be a great year for our kids, as the Lord defines greatness: year of growth, of deepening in maturity no matter what life brings, a year of increasing in wisdom, and stature, in favor with God and others.
As parents, we can’t (or should we) try to manipulate the “perfect” school year for our kids. I learned a long time ago that I do way more damage when I work against God, trying to force my perspectives on what success looks like for them, than when I trust God’s work in their lives and try to come alongside him in shepherding my kids in what he’s doing.
I have learned that my role is to create an environment that’s conducive to God’s work in their lives. And one of those ways is through practicing the spiritual disciplines, and one in particular is simplicity.
As I’ve said many times before, the spiritual disciplines are one of the major time-proven ways that God uses our work to transform our lives through the power of his Holy Spirit. They are his means of grace. We may not think about simplicity as one of those disciplines as often as others, like prayer or Bible study. But it’s extremely important.
In his classic Celebration of Discipline, Richard Foster says that simplicity is an inward reality that results in an outward lifestyle. Often, in our fallenness, our inward reality is that we lack a unity or focus that orients our lives. Absent this focus, our need for security leads us to what Foster calls “an insane attachment to things,” by which he means making decisions based on sound reasons about how we spend our time, resources, and energy one moment, and the very next based upon what other people will think of us, or what they’re doing, or our shame, or how our culture and mass media convince us we should spend them.
Lacking a focused center, we are guilty of, as my mom used to say, “running around like chickens with our heads cut off,” doing all kinds of activity at a frenetic pace, not having any coherent meaning or purpose. At the end of the day, we find ourselves exhausted and spent, our minds and bodies harried and preoccupied with things that don’t matter.
Simplicity starts with a center. And, for followers of Jesus, our center is found in him. In Matthew 6, Jesus says (paraphrasing)
“Don’t be anxious about your life, what you’re going to eat or drink, or what you think you need, or about scurrying around to try to acquire these things, or about positioning yourself or your kids for perfection. Look around at God’s creation. Hasn’t he provided for the animals and plants? Don’t you think he loves you more than them? Your focus should be on God and doing his work, helping to redeem broken things and people, and equipping your kids to do the same. God will take care of providing what you need. You can trust him to do that.”
What if that was our center, and what gave us peace and motivated us as we lived and raised our kids? Foster encourages this focus on the Lord and his kingdom to center and captivate our lives. If it does, it can change how we live outwardly, causing us to re-prioritize our lives and allowing us to live in a way that is simpler and countercultural, which positions our kids to not only have a great school year but also promotes peace and Christ-focus in their lives.
With Christ and his kingdom as our center this year, I thought about three basic and simple practices that can be game-changers for our families as we begin the school year. If we could incorporate these practices as regular rhythms of our family life, they would have a tremendous impact on our children’s peace and create an environment for a great year.
First, we can place limits on how our kids use digital technology and social media. This is a big one that I’ll have more to say about as the year goes on, but if you haven’t read The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt, you definitely should. Haidt is a sociologist, and his book is an important one for understanding the impact of technology on the rewiring of the childhood and adolescent brain in ways that promote and cause anxiety and depression. While you may not think it’s practical to eliminate phone and social media use from your kids’ lives, setting healthy limits is super-important.
Delaying the age at which your kids have access to these technologies is probably the best thing you can do, according to Haidt (he says, developmentally, not before ninth grade is best), but even having a certain time of night in which all family phones go in the kitchen for the evening is a good and simple practice. Since our school has decided to be phone-free, establishing limits like these at home will have the practical effect of limiting the number of hours your kids have access to these technologies.
I know this is tough (by fair the toughest of my recommendations) because peer pressure is great. This is a great opportunity to work with three, four, or five of your kids’ friends’ parents to come up with healthy boundaries you can all agree with and hold each other accountable to so that your child doesn’t have to have FOMO and be the “only kid” with healthy limits.
Simplicity suggestion two is to have dinner at home one or two nights a week. It doesn’t matter if you cook or not. If you like to cook or want your family to eat healthy, then cook. If you don’t have the time, order out. Do your best in that regard, but definitely schedule family meals and require everyone to be there (phone-and-other-media-free). This is the golden time of family enrichment, and the best opportunity for parents to help kids connect what happened during their day with what God is doing in their lives.
Research shows that families who eat together are more likely to build healthy bonds of connectedness. It’s also a “keystone habit” because it facilitates so many other family and spiritually enriching activities, like conversation, biblical instruction, and planning more family events and gatherings. It will also simplify your life, because deciding to have family dinner a couple nights a week forces you to prioritize your schedule. It will help you eliminate other things and activities (whether kids’ or your own) that are less important, are cluttering up your schedule, and that, if you’re honest, you’re either doing because of what others are doing or because you weren’t centered on God’s agenda before, but your own.
The third simple step is practicing the Sabbath. You can learn from my mistakes here. We began being intentional about practicing the Sabbath too late in our child-rearing years. As a result, we taught our kids a good work ethic, but didn’t teach them how to rest well from their work. As a result, they are more harried now as adults than I wish they were. They are learning the Sabbath now, by God’s grace, but I failed to lead them well in this area, to their harm.
So, because I love you, I’m pretty passionate that you won’t end up like me. God gave us limits and created the Sabbath to teach us to work from a place of rest. Rest not only makes us better, more effective, and sharper when we do our work, but it also teaches us to trust the Lord to give us the time we need the other six days to do the work he has for us. It’s a weekly discipline in trust. It is also a weekly spiritual, emotional, and physical reset for your family, allowing you to enter the week rested, refreshed, and ready.
Use the Sabbath to worship together, play together, and rest together. Read things that help you grow spiritually; listen to music that refreshes your soul; take a walk, watch a game, nap, eat good food, and enjoy God’s creation. If you’re so busy that you can’t do it, that’s a red flag that you need to reorder your life and say “no” to some things. Check your center.
My prayer for you, your kids, and your family is that you’ll use the fresh start of the new school year to simplify your life, ensuring that Jesus is at your center and driving how you order the year and how you use the precious time he’s given you with your kids. I pray this year is filled with joy and is transcendent for you.
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