New Year, New Teachers, New Schools

I have mixed feelings about the start of the school year. Schedule and routine are good. It's good to share, for a moment, my responsibility to teach and socialize my children with other members of our community. But, everything starts all at once. It's not enough to start school, we start piano, we start meetings like open house, back to school, leadership and everything seems to begin doubling up right away.

I know it will be this way and so, even on the first day of school, I hesitate just a bit. But, my kids are such geeks; they love school. They love learning new things, seeing their friends, testing out increased independence and I can't put the brakes on that.

This year, Z moves to the middle school with CE. He has a great schedule of teachers and classes, including his former first grade teacher who now teaches math. I love this woman! She is a wonderful teacher, a wonderful human being with such light emanating from her and she teaches that light in everything she does. She especially loves math and wants her students to love it just as much. CE is in her last year of middle school and realizes how much work is ahead of her and isn't in love with any of her teachers, so the idea of school has lost the bloom off the rose a bit. CW has the same teacher Z had for 4th grade and his teaching style seems uniquely tuned to how CW approaches the world. Bam's teacher is this lovely sarcastic spitfire of a woman who has been teaching for 20+ years and loves first grade. I love anyone who loves where my children are!

Miss M will begin preschool with Miss Jeannette after Labor Day and is dying to start. She struggles with why some of her friends went to kindergarten today but she can't go till next year (pesky late birthdays and all).

I feel we are amazingly blessed to have dedicated teachers and excellent schools and safe neighborhoods for our family to grow. The new year will bring what it brings. We will grow and schedule and routine are good for us, right?

Connections to the Divine

I've been noodling on this thought for a few weeks now. Let's see if I can get it out.

Several weeks ago I got to attend a missionary discussion with DH and a family whose husband is preparing to be baptized. The husband was asked about his experience at a niece's baptism and he said that it seemed to him like baptism, like attending the baptism provided a connection to the divine. That phrase of his has stayed with me ever since. I visualized myself as a large ship, with every spiritual experience I have as an anchor tying my spiritual ship to heaven, to Home. Attending church, feasting upon the scriptures, praying and fasting and serving in the Kingdom are all things that anchor me to God a little bit more. Covenants, ordinances, seem to me to be thicker cables, anchoring me more steadily in the making and keeping of serious and sober promises. I envision my children's ships as I help them to cast their own anchors, linking their spirits to God and to us as a family. When I keep this vision in place, my efforts seem more substantial, more successful and less sisyphean, less futile. I want to increase my connection to the divine, I want my ship to be bristling with anchors connecting me to the divine, to heaven, to Home.

And then this morning, I found an old note in a bunch of church stuff that had once been stuffed in my scriptures. I remember it came from a particularly enlightening Sunday School, but I no longer remember where or when. It underscores to me this connection to the divine I'm seeking.

In the Old Testament times, they had sin, burnt and peace offerings--the Law of Moses was the filter through which they partook of the Atonement which was to come.

With the completion of the Savior's part of the Atonement, we partake of it by exercising faith, hope and charity. We follow the first principles and ordinances of the gospel: faith repentance, baptism and receipt of the Holy Ghost. We endure to the end: obedience, sacrifice, gospel living, purity, and consecration. We prepare for and make covenants in the temple and we keep those covenants to eventually enter full fellowship with God.

Somehow writing out these elements, each of them their own connection to the divine, helps me to see a map, a checklist, more anchors to get me Home.

How do you connect to the Divine?