The two black walnut trees by my barn near the river never fail to catch my attention each time I pass by. True, we have 5 acres or so of trees of all types around our home, but out of all of them these two are easily the most noticeable. It has nothing to do with their size; they are nowhere near the biggest trees on the property. In fact, the oak tree just 40 feet away towers over them like a redwood over dogwoods.
No, what makes them so noticeable is that, though they are a mere 8 feet apart, one stands straight and tall and the other leans over at roughly a 45-degree angle. Mind you, it is not that it was once standing straight and then began to pull out of the ground and tilt from the base. The trunk itself actually bent for some reason and, since no one corrected it when it was young and tender, it simply grew that way from then on. At some point, it will end up getting so top-heavy and putting so much strain on the roots that it comes out of the ground entirely and falls.
During the most formative years of its life, no one trained it to stand straight when they saw it starting to go the wrong direction. And each time I see that and think on that fact, I am inevitably reminded of a parallel truth from Scripture. Proverbs 22:6 says, “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.”
The end of summer is rapidly approaching, and with it is coming a question that is, in the words of the younger crowd, “so 2020.” With COVID-19 very much still a thing, the entire question of what to do about school is on every parent’s mind. They have children to “train up” and now may not be quite sure what to do. Most schools simply emptied the last few months of the last school year, and parents were suddenly thrust into the role of being the main educators for their children. The start of this year seems just as uncertain, with some schools not planning to open for in-person learning at all and others doing a mixture of in-person and online learning.
But one advantage that we have in America, one tremendous blessing that we should never take for granted, is a wide array of choices in this matter. Some may simply opt to continue to utilize the public school system in whatever form it takes; others may choose Christian or other private schools; yet others may choose to fully home-school.