Planting Seeds You May Never See Grow

A Back-to-School Devotion for Teachers, In the Classroom or Around the Kitchen Table

There's a particular kind of tired that comes with the start of a school year. New supplies. New names to learn. New routines to build from scratch, whether you're walking into a classroom of twenty five students or sitting down at your own kitchen table with the ones God gave you first.

If you're a teacher this year, in a school building or a homeschool room, I want you to hear this before the first bell rings or the first math lesson begins.

You are not just teaching. You are stewarding.

1 Corinthians 4:2 says, "Moreover it is required in stewards that a man be found faithful." That verse has anchored everything I do here at The Encouraging Home, and I believe it belongs over your classroom door too, whether that door is made of steel or it's just the entrance to your dining room.

Paul wrote something else that I think was written for teachers specifically.

You will plant a hundred seeds this year. Patient corrections. Extra explanations. A kind word on a hard Tuesday. Most of those seeds you will never see grow. You won't get to watch the one you plant in September become the harvest it turns into ten years from now, in a student who remembers you said she was capable, or a child at your own table who grew up believing what you taught him about who God is.

That is the hard and holy work of teaching. You plant. You water. God gives the increase. Your job was never to control the growth. It was only ever to be faithful with the planting.

So today, before the new folders and freshly sharpened pencils, let this be true of you this year.

You are found faithful, not because every lesson goes perfectly, not because every child learns at the pace you hoped, but because you showed up and stewarded what was placed in front of you.

If there's a teacher in your life this back-to-school season, whether she's grading papers in a school building or teaching her own children around the table, I've put together a small printable gift tag with this same verse. Print it, attach it to a coffee, a candle, or a fresh box of pens, and let her know she's stewarding something eternal.

Mary | The Encouraging Home