(This was first published September 7, 2010.)

The assumption of school is that people can learn. The assumption of summer vacation is that people need a break from learning. The assumption of grade levels is that people mature. The assumption of curriculum is that structure can help the process of learning. The assumption of teachers (or tutors or mentors) is that some people know more about a particular subject and about how to learn about that particular subject. The assumption of graduation is that when a person has learned a prescribed amount of content and can demonstrated that learning in a designated way, it is time to move on to another learning setting. The assumption of repetition is that clearly structured practice helps with the process of learning.

I know that we could have many conversations about those assumptions. We can identify how often they break down in individual classrooms or individual schools. We can debate whether grade levels are the best way to distinguish learning levels. However, it is difficult to disagree that we move from knowing less to knowing more, and that being intentional about that process makes sense in many areas of our lives.

So what about the God part of our lives? As you think about kids going back to school and teachers going back to school. what would it look like for us to go back to school this fall?

The writer of Proverbs quotes Wisdom as saying,

Instruct a wise man and he will be wiser still;  teach a righteous man and he will add to his learning. The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom,  and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding. For through me your days will be many,  and years will be added to your life.

What courses are you signed up for this fall?

Most Saturday nights, a dozen of us get together in the church basement. Two or three people bring the meal. Mostly comfort food. Someone from the family that brings the meal thanks God for the food and the time together. And then we eat, gathered around a long table. We take an hour or so, conversations merging into one and then splitting apart again.

We laugh. We ask about the visit from out of town, the emergency room call, the job search. We go back for seconds. We share life.

We move our circle slowly to a cluster of sofas. We talk about how we can help a couple people who need help with a porch, with getting to college. And then we dig into the implications of the sermon we heard the week before. We wrestle with how to make something a habit, with what Jesus really meant when he said that, with why we feel so trapped by perfectionism when God talks about grace.

It takes about ninety minutes to exhaust the handful of questions in front of us, ninety minutes to let others see our struggles, our souls, our dilemmas, our faith. And then we take another twenty minutes, after we are officially done, to finally say goodbye. And we go home.

The next morning, most of us are in the same building. We see each other with a smile, aware that Sunday actually started Saturday night, that church isn’t just what looks like a concert and lecture, it’s the life we shared on Saturday night. And the projects we’ve done for other people.

We started a couple years ago. Just for six weeks. Now we can’t stop.

It’s not complicated, by the way. It starts with “you hungery? For supper and God?”

And goes from there.

There are spaces in the Gospels where a trip is summarized with “they traveled to” or “sometime later”. We don’t know what happened in those gaps, in those times of traveling, in those periods of just living.

One day, perhaps, Jesus and the disciples were traveling through the hill country. They stopped, midday, under the scrub trees.

Looking across the valley, they all saw a shepherd, driving his flock of sheep.

“The Lord is my shepherd,” Jesus murmured to himself.

“What?” asked John, sitting nearby.

“The Lord is my shepherd. I don’t have to worry about providing for myself. He leads me next to quiet pools. He stops til I sit down. He heals me, inside and out.”

“What was David talking about?” John asked, quietly, as the rest of the guys were dozing.

“This,” Jesus said, glancing around. “A life of following the Bread and the Water, of chatting with the shepherd, of belonging, of feeling at home in the middle of anything.”

“But how did David know that? I mean, he was being wishful, right? Imagining what it might be like to have God be a shepherd like him?” John said, mostly wanting to understand.

Jesus looked at John, quietly. He looked at the sheep across the valley, he looked at the sleeping disciples, Peter with a faint smile on his face. He looked at the scraps of food, at the pool where everyone had washed the dust from their feet and faces and flowing mountain stream where they had filled their mouths and leather bottles.

He looked at John as if to say, “For David and I it was just like this.”

John looked up at the sun, trying to gauge the time. He started to say, “Don’t we need to get moving?” And then he stopped.

(This is revised from August 18, 2009)