Prayer for a New School Year

 

Dear Father, it's school time--for most people ages 5-22, of course, but also for me. My first prayer isn't going to be that everyone will learn their lessons well, get good grades, or graduate. Or find their passions, make friends, learn to cooperate with classmates and teachers, or decide to finally get extra help in those areas where they're struggling.  

No, my first prayer is going to be that what we learn is truth. Because it's possible to learn untruth.

Learning isn't the first thing. Truth is. 

When I was a young adult, fresh out of four years of college during which I may have thought about You twice, if that, I prayed a prayer and asked You for the truth. Not "the truth about_____" fill in the blank, but general, free-floating truth. Fundamental, global truth, I guess. And over the following two or three years, You gave me Jesus. The Way, the Truth, and the Life. The Truth in Whom all things hold together. 

We can almost stop right there. I imagine that in eternity we'll stop right there for a long, long "time." Just gazing at Him. Because we need nothing that is not found in Him.

But there's also the written word that is true, that explains to people 2000 years later Who He is, what He did, and why. The word that is an extension of Him--the Truth. The Scripture.

And people, lots of people, understand great swaths of it. They compare translations (if they're willing to read more than one); look at study notes, commentaries, and concordances; maybe even look at or read the original languages; ponder it; debate it; argue it; quarrel over it; split over it. Call each other unsaved or heretics over it. We know truth (and, hopefully, Truth) and don't know it--both. We're all of us wrong about some aspect of it.

These very Scriptures are what I'll be studying this school year. And again, I'm asking You for the truth. I don't want to see something that isn't there. I don't want to miss what is there. I don't want to misunderstand something because I'm reading it through the lens of what I've always been told. Help me separate truth from tradition, opinion, and downright falsehood. In cases where simply no one can be sure about something, bless me with the best insight and the most truth I can handle or that is appointed to me. And that will be more than enough, because when we have You--Jesus Christ--we have the Truth. Never leaving or forsaking us. As close as the mention of Your name. 

And we can, in the truest sense, stop right there. 

So we pray in Your name. Take us further into truth by first and foremost taking us further into Yourself. In Your name we pray. Amen.