Tag Archives: high school

The holiness of a four-way stop

It’s rush hour on my usually-quiet suburban street. Well, maybe not rush “hour”, exactly. It’s really only about 15 minutes.

From around 7:10 to 7:25 most every morning during the school year, the street in front of my house is bumper to bumper with high school students trying to get to classes on time.

IMG_3496bfree-largeSchool starts at 7:30 and they’re lined up at the four-way stop, struggling to properly yield the right of way to each other (as they oh-so-recently learned in driver’s ed). Now and then, I hear someone sound their horn over whatever perceived infraction just took place. That usually happens as it gets closer to 7:30 and the possibility of being late becomes more real.

Oh, and sympathies to you if you have to back out of your driveway during that time frame. Taking turns and being nice apparently only applied to kindergarten. I may have muttered about this from time to time over the years…

Interestingly, I’ve found that there’s something positive and even holy about this brief traffic jam in front of my house each morning. It gives me an opportunity to see the individual young faces in those cars and wonder if anyone has prayed for them yet today. Maybe not. (I’m thinking, most likely not.) So lately, I’ve started praying.

I start with the obvious prayers like,

Lord, please keep these young people safe at school today, encourage them to be responsible and make wise choices, protect them from peer pressure, help them learn and grow into good citizens.

Then it goes a little deeper:

Let them know that they have value, surprise them with encouragement today from an unexpected source, give them courage for whatever battle they face, make them sensitive to the pain of the marginalized around them.

Ultimately, and arguably most important, I arrive here:

Let them recognize Your hand on their lives, soften their hearts toward faith, welcome them into a relationship with You.

Even if you don’t live near a high school or have teenagers in your life currently, they’re out there–I see them every day from my living room window–and they could use your prayers. Adolescence is a tumultuous time, you may recall, and this rough world isn’t getting any better any time soon.

For sure, if you have a student at the high school in my town and they drive past my house in the morning, you can know they’re going to get prayed for. Maybe running late and getting stuck in traffic at the four-way stop isn’t the worst thing for them, after all.

And for me, it beats muttering.

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How the high school track team reminds me of God’s faithfulness

IMG_3625For 24 years, I’ve lived about a 7-iron shot from the local high school. (If I were a decent golfer, it might be a chip shot, but hey.) I hear the marching band practicing all summer; in the fall, I hear the announcer on the PA calling the football games. I watch the before and after-school traffic jams throughout the winter. Soon I feel a bittersweet pang as I hear names being read off in that same stadium during graduation.

I love high school kids, always have. There’s something so endearing and vulnerable about them, even when they’re posturing and trying to be cool. They’re all insecure, some just hide it better than others. I get that.

When I first moved here, I would get irritated when kids threw trash from their cars as they sped past my house; now, I’m alarmed to see them texting as they go by, still speeding (some things don’t change). And sadly, there’s a whole bullying drama unfolding in my neighborhood lately that has a dark edge to it. That makes me angry…and sad. Continue reading How the high school track team reminds me of God’s faithfulness