New Life

Later, I attended a Christian school—a nice private school where smiling adults had energy and faith and not just rules and paddles. One harvest day, the weathermen reported a frost on the way. This was bad news for the local farm crowd, and particularly for Bob, whose combine had broken down in the rush to harvest as many crops as possible before the frost arrived. News traveled fast, and before we knew it, our teacher was encouraging us to pray for Bob’s farm machinery.

Of course, contrary to rational adult thinking, the combine started working and, by some reports, at the exact minute we prayed.

You say that engines sputter and catch every day—why bring God into it? I say that sometimes, too. Actually, I say that most times. And when I don’t say it, I think it. Combines do fail and recover, minus any supernatural intervention. But back then I knew God changed things….

…The school I transferred to in third grade met both qualifications.
Its name was New Life — an obvious tribute to the transformation
God inspired in his followers, though, again, the call to change did
not necessarily jump out to me at the time. In addition to sharing
the same faith, the school met my parents’ basic safety requirements.
Their recess monitors, for example, did near-perfect impressions of
our mom telling us to stop f linging ourselves off the monkey bars or
we’d break our necks.

This was a claim I heard often as a child: If kids persisted with
certain behaviors — goofing around at the grocery store or walking
a parking block like a balance beam — they would break their necks.
Apparently the neck is the first thing to go in an eight-year-old. I
never did actually see anyone break their neck though. Perhaps because in schools as orderly as the ones I was sent to, breaking your
neck would have definitely been against the rules.

While, in theory, all schools are orderly, this one was particularly
well organized. Hence I was the only eight-year-old in my neighborhood
who had her own cubicle. Made from a two-and-ahalf-
foot square slab of table and fenced in on either side by particle
board dividers, the function of such a cubicle, I think, was to protect
students like me from anything that might distract us from our
education.

…To read the rest of Sarah’s reflections on life in Summerfield, order the book here.

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