JESUS CHRIST AND EDUCATION

Jesus Christ and Education Sparking a child's desire to know is not difficult. It is easily stimulated by recurrent conversations, songs, exposures to varying environments, persistent hopeful encouragement to that child, patience, protection from countervailing harm, and love. Our loving mother lacked "formal" education . Formal education is not necessary to teach a child. It helps, but is not indispensable. As many examples from our recent Southern pre-migration history attest, black mothers like our own were "miracle workers!" Their "miracle," and her miracle, was being able to let their 'lights so shine' they could light the wicks of their offspring, and others' they met along the way needing lit. Resourcefully resisting naysayers' negative nets and forces of doom, while she was consciously teaching them of fowlers' hidden snares and traps. She was also continually even into our adulthood insisting on our always remaining clad in "the whole armor of God; insisting we be "prayed-up," wake or asleep. That "whole armor of God" was the knowledge, the love of Jesus Christ and our educations above all else! She loved education's ennobling enchantments and promises that "richly rewarded" all that sought it. She also admired persons with an education, and was ever offering us such scraps of information as she may have uncovered about its trove of beneficent bounties to her brood of eight children unceasingly! She was "joined at the hip" in this holy work, in this respect by our just-as-vigilant, just as resourceful, loving father, who, also lacking formal education, was just as adamant, just as persistent toward us, just as determined, as was our mother! I speak these hopeful words of personally-experienced, familial instruction, in love, to all those mothers, grandmothers, fathers, or grandfathers, or others, anywhere, that may need them. I speak them to those who may find themselves with the burdens and the blessings that must be borne, and realized, in or from child rearing in year 2016 and beyond . You are doing a great work! It is God's work! Buckle up! "Bow your necks," plant your feet; put your shoulders to the wheel, then, sow, water, tend your 'seed,' keep away the weeds and weevils of destruction and glorify God with the abundant richness of the crop! Hosea 4:6 contains the eternal beatitude on knowledge 's reward. It says "My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge: because thou have rejected knowledge, I will also reject thee: that though shall be no priest to me: seeing thou have forgotten the law of thy God, I will also forget thy children." In Jesus blessed name, I pray! Amen!