On Sunday night, the night before Anna headed back to college, we had our annual 'Back to School Blessing'. It is a really special tradition that we started years ago.
On this night we like to pause and share with our girls a family intention for the upcoming school year.
This summer I spent a lot of time pouring into my girls. So at the end of the summer I really wanted to pull together all of the learning we had done all summer long.
Part One:
This summer I read aloud the classic story, The Secret Garden (the unabridged - I do think there are some shorter chapter books out there and even some picture books) by Frances Hodgson Burnett. There is so much I could say about this book, truly a book about light and darkness and what happens when we let beauty into our lives... when physical beauty comes into our lives it changes us.
I read that book bit by bit, chapter by chapter throughout the summer and finished reading it aloud by the end of the summer.
On our Back to School Blessing night I reread this quote from chapter 27:
"So long as Mistress Mary's mind was full of disagreeable thoughts about her dislikes and sour opinions of people and her determination not to be pleased by or interested in anything, she was a yellow-faced, sickly, bored, and wretched child. Circumstances, however, were very kind to her, though she was not at all aware of it. They began to push her about for her own good. When her mind gradually filled itself with robins, and moorland cottages crowded with children, with queer, crabbed old gardeners and common little Yorkshire housemaids, with springtime and with secret gardens coming alive day by day, and also with a moor boy and his 'creatures', there was no room left for the disagreeable thoughts which affected her liver and her digestion and made her yellow and tired. So long as Colin shut himself up in his room and thought only of his fears and weakness and his detestation of people who looked at him and reflected hurly on humps and early death, he was a hysterical, half-crazy little hypochondriac who knew nothing of the sunshine and the spring, and also did not know that he could get well and stand upon his feet if he tried to do it. When new, beautiful thoughts began to push out the old, hideous ones, life began to come back to him, his blood ran healthily through his veins, and strength poured into him like a flood. His scientific experiment was quite practical and simple and there was nothing weird about it at all. Much more surprising things can happen to anyone who, when a disagreeable or discoursed thought comes into his mind, just has the sense to remember in time and push it out by putting in an agreeable, determinedly courageous own. Two things cannot be in one place.
Where you tend a rose, by lad,
A thistle cannot grow.
Oh that thought in there about how we push out the bad thoughts - how we can fill our minds so much with the good that there is no room for discontented, unhealthy ones. "Two things cannot by in one place" We spent some time on that piece there.
There really are so many times when we are in dark days and it just feels impossible to lift ourselves. I wanted the girls to have a picture in their mind of the secret garden in that book and how the two children changed because of the beauty. We all need to be reminded that goodness and beauty are waiting for us and they will change our thought patterns until we are changed.
I believe strongly that when beautiful thoughts begin to push out the old, hideous one, life comes back and strength will pour into us like a flood.
Part Two:
Oh goodness, I didn't take a photo of something important that was on the table that night. Throughout the summer I had typed up all of the notes from every bible study - every dinnertime devotional - every discussion that I tried to reach their hearts. They are now all in one document that they can have forever. And I talked about how now they have everything they need. As Proverbs states in chapter 4, we get wisdom and when wisdom is part of your life, it is beautiful.
Here are some other posts you might like of 'Back to School Blessings in years past.
