Grace: A Back-to-School Survival Guide

I love back-to-school season. When I’ve planned my summer right, we achieve the perfect mix of scheduled stuff—camps, swimming lessons, sleepovers—with unstructured days to sleep in, lay around, be creative and/or watch too much TV. Warm weather, long days, fewer demands—it’s all pretty wonderful.

But even after the best of summers, I’m still a little bit like this guy (best commercial ever).

I like new school clothes. And I love new school supplies.  It’s fun to meet new teachers and start to think about what my kids are going to do in their next year of school. I start to crave a bit more structure. I start to miss the rain a little and I like the sense of settling into a new normal.

But then…this is 2020.

This summer—pardon my language—has sucked.  And it wasn’t just this summer. This spring sucked too. We had to cancel plans and adjust the way our days worked. We had to fight over how worried we actually were about this new virus and try to navigate recommendations, perceptions from health experts, counter-perceptions from YouTube videos and friends-of-friends on Facebook and All. Of. The. Nonsense. For five-and-a-half months.

The delicate balance I hope to strike each summer was thrown off even before summer arrived. We were already cooped up inside, trying to balance a new way of doing school, trying to manage our balance between fear and function, and, in my case, going upstairs and crying by myself for no apparent reason every couple of weeks.

So here we are.  School is supposed to start. Routines are supposed to be reviewed and the next year’s “normal” is supposed to solidify over the next few weeks.

But this year’s “normal” is anything but. Most schools in our area are online-only. Which means that parents who depended on their kids’ school day to do their own professional work, maintain their homes, and get a break to pursue callings outside of parenting are having to postpone some plans, lower their standards on others, and—in the end—figure out how to teach second grade and do their jobs at the same time.

So, other than for catharsis, why am I writing this post for a church blog site?

Because back-to-school is a pain point for me. I think it’s a pain point for a lot of parents right now.

And God is in our pain points.

Grace in Our Pain Points

I think we (and by “we,” I mean “I”) really lean on God when things are super big. When things are obviously beyond us. The Job moments. When things are full-on collapsing.  When our jobs get reduced and we’re left with no income.  When our partners or parents or children get COVID and end up in the hospital. Or worse.

My 2020 hasn’t had many Job moments.

And even if it had, the big things still get lived out in the day-to-day. And the day-to-day doesn’t always feel big and dramatic. It just feels wearing. Annoying. Frustrating. Exhausting.

My 2020 hasn’t had many Job moments…but it’s had a lot of Paul moments.

In 2 Corinthians chapter 12, Paul relates how God allowed him to suffer not a massive tragedy, but an ongoing challenge, a “thorn in my flesh, a messenger from Satan to torment me and keep me from becoming proud.”

We don’t know what that “thorn” was—though many have speculated. In the end, it doesn’t matter. We know that it was painful—perhaps physically, perhaps emotionally. We know that it wasn’t a one-time event. It was something that sat there and wouldn’t go away. Paul begged God to remove it multiple times, but it remained a part of his life.

Kind of like this virus.

While we don’t know what the “thorn” was, we know why it was a part of Paul’s life. He tells us: it was to “…keep me from becoming proud.” Paul had had some experiences—some visions from God—that threatened to make him proud and damage his ministry. But his “thorn” kept him humble. It reminded him constantly that he was weak and in need.

2 Corinthians 12: 8-9 reads,

“Three different times, I begged the Lord to take it away. Each time he said, ‘My Grace is all you need. My power works best in weakness.’”

That’s the why behind the why.  God doesn’t always remove our thorns in order to keep us from becoming proud. And he keeps us from becoming proud because his power works best in weakness.

Honestly, my circumstances could be a lot worse. We didn’t lose our income and no one in our family has gotten sick. Nevertheless, I’ve felt pretty weak over the past five months. I’ve felt scared. Frustrated. At times, depressed. Often, I found myself standing in the middle of a room wondering, “What I’m supposed to be doing right now?”

What do we do with our Paul moments—those moments when the challenges seem relentless? When we need a change of venue, a break from the boredom, the tension, the stress, the monotony, the constant demands to things outside of our gifting?

As Paul shows us, these things should drive us to God and his grace.

Grace in the “Not Normal”

So what does that look like? Well, again, we can look at Paul’s example.

First of all, he prayed for relief.  I get a lot of encouragement from that. It’s OK to ask God for relief. We don’t have to pretend to be spiritual Marines when life gets difficult. It’s OK for us to ask God to make painful things stop. He won’t always say “yes,” but he never begrudges our asking.

So if God says no, what’s our next step? Our next step is to acknowledge that God’s grace is all we need.

I have to admit, that sounds so much easier than it actually is—at least for me. Intellectually, I completely concur with the belief that I need God’s grace and can’t do anything spiritually for myself. But in my day-to-day life, I try so darn hard to do everything on my own.

The thing that has been the hardest for me during this season is not being able to get to the end the day and feel good about accomplishing things. I’ve hated how my entire being seems to have been stuck in a vat of quicksand and every accomplishment seems to have taken way more time and effort to achieve than it should have. It’s driven me crazy.

And it’s the exact opposite of what I should have been doing. I should have been leaning on God’s grace. Handling what he gives me moment-by-moment, and refusing to get ahead of him and try to pile up a bunch of accomplishments to make myself feel good.

 God didn’t remove Paul’s thorn.  And for the time being, many of us will continue to experience the same “not normal” that’s been a part of our lives since March.

Right now, for many parents, especially moms on whom most home-based work generally falls, our strength is NOT on display. Some of us are working on tight budgets trying to make diminished income and government stimulus checks stretch. Some of us are OK financially, but are desperate for a moment to take a breath and think—and our small children make that nearly impossible.

And it feels like that’s been going on for a long time.  The arrival of back-to-school season this year has almost made it worse.  It’s a reminder that things are supposed to be getting back to normal.  Things always get back to normal in September.  But they’re not this year.

Our strength is not on display right now. But God’s is.

That doesn’t mean this thorn isn’t going to hurt for a while. It probably will. But we can continue to come to God in our pain and ask for relief. And until that relief arrives, we can ask him to help us lean on him and allow his power to be on display in our lives.

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