Timeless

My love of new office supplies started when I was very young and shopping for school supplies. Few things held as much entertainment for me as wandering down that long school supply aisle at WalMart. I would carefully select new folders, notebooks, pens, rulers, crayons, markers, pencil boxes and a backpack. There was something wonderful and inviting about those completely empty pages in the notebooks - something oddly thrilling about using that crayon for the first time.

My mom still teaches at the small country Christian grade school I attended as a child. Today is the first day of classes there. Memories of my first days of school come flooding back to me. Those days were more fun than the last days of school for me.

I would arrive at school and go straight to my new classroom. There was a frantic search for that perfect desk. Upon selecting the perfect desk, we were treated to the joyous task of unpacking our stuffed backpacks of all their new school supply gloriousness. Careful time was spent placing pencils, glue and scissors in the perfect configuration in the pencil box. Our teachers would often tape brightly colored name tags on our desk. There were new bulletin boards, new books here and there, new people, new rules. Somewhere at the beginning of the day our textbooks were distributed. More thrilling to me were the workbooks they passed out. The perfect corners - not yet ruffled and damaged, the pages full of blanks waiting to be filled in, the first page where I would carefully write my name in my best penmanship. Ever so carefully, I would organize the contents of my desk.

After a week or two, that newness would wear off and I would fall back into the pattern of school life. The corners of my workbooks would become rounded and butterflied. The new crayons would look like all the other used crayons in the world - dull tips, torn paper wrappers. The pencil box would occasionally become messy and unmanageable. The name tag on the front of my desk would fade.

Life is a lot like that. I can't tell you how many times I have gone to the store, found that MUST HAVE item, purchased it, and brought it home thinking it would change my life. And maybe it did change my life. But eventually I would forget about it and just accept it as something I had always had.

But there are a few things in life that go against the flow - things that never grow old, or if they do, they change. They are timeless. Friendships and relationships are one of those things. At first they are new and exciting, but even when they fall into their patterns, they still offer more each time we turn to them. My Bible is another one. I have read through the entire thing, but each time I re-read a portion I find something new and wonderful. Even though the words have remained the same, the meanings change over time and over experiences.

So happy first day of school to all the lucky little kids who had the fun task of unpacking the new supplies and organizing their desk today. And to my mom, I hope you had a fun day building on old relationships and starting new ones with your students.