It's our Back to School Blessing dinner. Scott and I started this years ago. Some things have changed along the way. But the core of it is the same.
It's important to us to find a way to acknowledge the start of another school year for our daughters. And even more importantly we want to give them a theme/a mission statement. And we want to start the year in God's grace and blessings.
It takes us a long time to find just the right message to bless our girls with. And we talk about it for a while. And pray about it.
This year I decided to make a cozy dinner at home. I moved the kitchen table in the living room and get it all up with cozy colors. Elegant, but cozy. And different. Because this is no ordinary dinner time. It needs to be set apart for any other. And I want my girls to feel special.
It's almost like a holiday to them now. There's an anticipation about this night all week as we look forward to it.
Of course now the stained glass stars have become a tradition too. And they were beautiful this year. The girls have quite a collection now, each one with their name, the year and the grade they were starting.
As the darkness came and we had dinner Scott and I began to tell the girls about our family theme for this school year. We chose DIVE IN as our theme. (Steven Curtis Chapman)
We felt like Abigail leaving her elementary school years behind and starting middle school and Scott leaving his beloved elementary school and starting his new career in middle school were Diving In to a new path in life. But really, it was more practical (day to day) for us. The message we wanted the girls to come away with was one of diving in to the work at hand. They work that God laid out for each of us each day. To dive in also means to start what we need to do. To just start homework, start a task. Just dive in!
Even more important was the Bible verse that will be our guiding light this school year.
Ecclesiastes 11:4
He who observes the wind (and waits for all conditions to be favorable) will not sow; and he who regards the clouds will not reap.
Instead of waiting or everything to be just right just dive in. Instead of waiting for what seemed like the right year to go back to the classroom, I just dove in last year to the door that God opened up for me. And it was a marvelous blessing. Scott dove in this year and all four of us dive in every day.
2017 is here
2016 is here
2015 is here
