The First Day

Summer is over, and the Jones children head into a new school year at Glendale Christian Academy — where, this year, the halls are full of family. Their aunts, aunt Jessica and aunt Tanya, are teachers; their grown cousins, the twins Alexis and Alyssa, are classroom aides for the very first time. So when the first-day jitters give way to a building stacked with people who love them, the Joneses are reminded that God really does go in with you. But there is one boy at the cubbies who has none of that — Micah, brand-new in town, crying quietly with nobody in the world to sit by. And Ava Grace, six years old and wrapped in more belonging than she can hold, discovers that once God has gone in with you, He has a way of turning you right around to go in with somebody else. Scripture: Joshua 1:9; Deuteronomy 31:8 (KJV).

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SPEAKER_00 1:19

Welcome to the Jones Family Chronicles. For life at school, home and church is always full of lessons, laughter, and love. Meet Dad, the pastor's assistant, Mom, the heart of the home, and their five bright and lively kids. Allison, Addison, Anna, Ava Grace, and little Andy, who somehow always managed to turn ordinary days into extraordinary adventures. So gather round, open your heart, and let's discover together the joy of faith, family, and the timeless truths of God's Word. This is the Jones Family Chronicles. All right, kids, gather close. Papa has a story for you about your favorite family The Joneses The last morning of summer does not feel like the other mornings of summer. It has a different air to it. There's a new lunch box on the counter and a stiffness to the new shoes, and a whole school gear standing out there in the dark that nobody has walked into yet. The Jones house was up before the sun that morning, and it was nervous, though every single person in it was being nervous in an entirely different way. Alison was moving up this year into the upper grade classroom, and the big kids and the hardest work she had ever been handed, and her teacher of all the teachers in the world was going to be Sister Banda, who also happened to be her own aunt. You would think that would settle a girl's nerves. Instead, it handed Alison a brand new one. Everybody would be watching to see whether the teacher's niece got treated soft, and Alison would sooner walk into the sea than get treated soft. On top of which Aunt Jessica was famous for teaching deeper than the worksheet, and Allison did dearly love a worksheet. Addison was nervous in a quieter place. Her outfit had been laid out for a week and it was right, and for once the clothes were not the problem. The problem was that her best schoolfriend Janet had moved away over the summer, clear across the state, and this was the first August in Addison's memory that she would walk into a classroom without her person already saving her a seat. Cousin Alyssa would be aiding in the fourth grade room, which helped, but an aide is a grown up, and a grown up is not the same as a friend who saves your seat. Anna, for her part, was not nervous even a little bit, and made up for the household shortage of calm by narrating everyone else's nerves at an impressive speed. She was headed into Sister Johnson's room, also an aunt, and cousin Alexis for an aid, and her own little sister beside her, and as far as Anna was concerned, the second grade was going to be the best thing that had ever happened to anybody. And Ava Grace was nervous in the biggest way of all, and said the least about it, which is exactly how you would expect it to go. She was six now. Six meant a real classroom for the first time, the combined first and second room down at the end of the little kids hall. She knew Anna would be in there, and cousin Alexis too. But it was still new, and still big, and she sat at the table in her new shoes with her cereal going soft and didn't eat it, because nobody's cousin can climb inside your stomach and sit with the flutter for you. Andy noticed too. Andy noticed anybody who had gone still. He toddled over and leaned his whole self against her leg and looked up and offered the only comfort he had. Happy? he said. Hopefully. As though he could hand it to her. Ava Grace put her hand on his head and did not feel happy, but she felt a little less alone, which is sometimes the same size. Mom moved through all of it, filling water bottles and finding the other shoe, and if her eyes were a little bright, well, a mother has her own news seasons too, and one of them is the morning the littlest one is suddenly big enough for a real classroom. Before anybody could bolt for the car, Dad said, Sit down for a minute, all of you. Andy too. And he reached for the Bible that was never far from him. I want to read to you about a fellow named Joshua, Dad said. He had a whole new country to walk into. Never been there, didn't know the way, didn't know the people, didn't know what was waiting on him. If anybody ever had a first day, it was Joshua. He found the place. Here's what God told him. Have not I commanded thee, be strong and of a good courage, be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed, for the Lord thy God is with thee whithersoever thou goest. Joshua one and nine. Whithersoever thou goest, Dad said. That's a big old word that just means wherever. Every single where, including the end of the little kid's hall. He looked at Ava Grace when he said it just for a second, not enough to make a thing of it. Then he turned a few pages and read them one more because he wanted to leave them too. And the Lord, he it is that doth go before thee. He will be with thee, he will not fail thee, neither forsake thee, fear not, neither be dismayed. Deuteronomy thirty one and eight. He goes before thee, and he's with thee, Dad said. Listen, I'm going to drop you off this morning. I'll pull up to the curb and you'll get out and I'll drive away because that's just how it works. I can't come sit in your classrooms. He closed the book. But God doesn't drop you off. God doesn't wave from the driveway. He goes in with you every room all day. He's already in there waiting when you walk in the door. Alison, who was still turning her own worry over, said, Even in Aunt Jessica's class, she doesn't go easy on anybody. Especially Aunt Jessica's class. And remember, it's sister banda while you're at school, Dad said, and very nearly smiled. On the way they passed Brother Thompson's porch, where he and Sister Beverly sat over their coffee in the two chairs, easy as anything, still content to wait on the Lord's good time, which is its own kind of first day lesson, if you think about it. Now there was a thing about Dad in that school that the younger ones hardly remembered and the older ones did. Dad had run the place once. For years he had been the principal at Glendale Christian Academy, the man whose name was on the office door, who knew every child by name coming up the walk. Then he had traded all of that for the back of the room and become the pastor's assistant. And it had been the right thing, and he had never once looked back. But there is a particular feeling of walking your own children up the steps of a building you used to be in charge of as just their dad now, one more parent at drop off. Dad felt it that morning, but didn't say a word about it. At the doors their aunt, sister Banda, to the whole school, Aunt Jessica to them, was greeting the children the way she always had. She gave Dad a nod and gave her nieces a look that was warm and no nonsense at once, a particular gift that ants have. Then the walk did what the first day walk always does, but it didn't scatter them off among strangers the way it does for some children. It gathered them in. Alison went up toward the upper hall in Sister Banda's room, chin up, stomach down. Addison went toward Sister Suarez's fourth grade where Sister Alyssa would be. Anna went bounding off toward Sister Johnson's room like she owned it, because as far as Anna was concerned she did. And Ava Grace, well, Ava Grace hung back half a step, the way the littlest one does, and looked down the little kids hall toward her new room, which was closer than the big kids hall, and still, to her, about a mile away. For one moment she could not make her new shoes move. She made them move. That was its own small brave thing, and nobody saw it, and it counted anyway. She went into the room, and it was a good room, sunny with a rug and a reading corner, and sister Alexis, on her first morning as a real aide laying out name cards and looking about half as nervous as the children. Anna had already crossed the room and found two friends from last year. It was in fact a room full of Ava Grace's people, which was exactly how she came to notice the boy, who had none. He was over by the cubbies with his back to the room, and you could tell he was new the way you can always somehow tell. Something about how he stood, like he was not sure he was allowed to be there. His name, it would turn out, was Micah, and his family had moved to town back in June. A lonely month to move after the friendships have already been made and before school hand you any new ones. His shoulders were up around his ears, and he was crying. Not loud the worst kind, the kind you do quiet so nobody notices. Ava Grace noticed. Ava Grace always noticed. And she saw in one plain instant the whole difference between them. She had a sister in this room, an aunt and a cousin at the front of it, an aunt down the hall and a dad who used to run the building. Micah had a cubby, a wet face, and nobody at all. She went over to the boy. She didn't have a plan. Alison would have had a plan. Ava Grace just had three words. The way she always just had three words, and she stood next to the crying boy and used the I'm scared too, she said. The boy looked up because that is not what anybody says. Everyone else that morning had told him it would be great, it would be fun, he'd make friends in no time, all the bright things grown ups say. And here was a small girl in brand new shoes handing him the one thing true instead.

SPEAKER_01 13:14

Me too. You are? he said. The scaredest, said Ava Grace.

SPEAKER_00 13:23

And it was still true, new rooms being new rooms. But then she did the thing that surprised even her. She looked around at how full her own morning was, at Anna laughing by the window, at Sister Alexis and the name cards, and then back to Micah, who had none of it. And she understood. And the quiet, complete way she understood things, that she had extra. So she gave him some. That's my sister, she said, pointing, and that lady is my aunt, and the one with the cards is my cousin. And my dad read us this morning about how God goes in with you. Not just drops you off, goes all the way in. He's already here. She held out her hand. So you can be with us. We'll be your somebody. Micah wiped his face with the back of his hand and looked at the room like it might be a different room than the one he had been crying about. And in a way by then it actually was. Can I sit by you? he asked. Oh, you have to, said Ava Grace with total authority, as if it were a rule. We're the scared ones, we go together. And that was that. She had walked into that room wrapped in more family than she could hold, and had turned right around and become the family God sent in for a boy who didn't have any. The strangest part, the part she could never have explained, was that giving Micah some of her belonging was the very thing that finally made her brave. The fear had not gone anywhere. It had just been given a job to do. Across the room, Sister Alexis watched her littlest cousin take the new boy by the hand and had to blink a couple of times, and got back to her name cards. That was more or less how it went for all of them, though they didn't compare notes until supper. Alison walked into Sister Banda's room braced for the hardest year of her life, and braced for something else besides. For her aunt to go soft on her or hard on her, both of which would have been their own kind of misery. Sister Banda did neither. She called on Alison exactly as much as she called on anybody, got a wrong answer out of her before the first hour was up, and did not rescue her from it. And Alison, who had spent the whole morning afraid of precisely that, found she could breathe. Being treated like everybody else, it turned out, was its own kind of love. And when Sister Banda posed a question with no clean answer on any worksheet anywhere, Alison felt the old need to get it settled and under control rise up and let it go, because you can't outline your way into a thing you were only meant to wonder about. Addison had walked into Sister Suarez's fourth grade, past the ghost of Janet's locker, with her jaw set and sat down alone, and was halfway into feeling sorry for herself when two things happened close together. Sister Alyssa, aiding for the first time and nervous in her own grown up way, caught Addison's eye across the strange room and gave her a small private wave, family to family. And then a girl Addison had never met leaned over and said she liked her shoes, which they were, in fact, exactly the right shoes. Addison had not worn them to make a friend, but it turns out the right detail, worn honest, will sometimes go and find you one anyway. And Anna had decided that having sister Alexis for an aid was the greatest thing ever to happen to the second grade, and said so loudly, roughly 40 times before lunch, so that Alexis, on the first morning of her brand new job, learned that having family in your very first classroom is a mercy and a trial in equal measure. Andy had the longest day of anybody because Andy had to stay home. And a house with all the big kids gone out of it is a strange and echoing place for a two year old. He carried his red ball from room to room looking for somebody to give it to and couldn't find one single person who needed it, which had never once happened before, and he didn't care for that at all. But at three o'clock, Mom loaded him into the car and they went and sat at the curb. And when that front door opened and all four of them came pouring out into the afternoon, Andy came up out of his seat like a cork out of a bottle. Happy, happy, he shouted, both arms up. And for once nobody had to wonder what he meant. They talked the whole way home, all at once over the top of each other, the way the Joneses did. And when it finally sorted itself out, the shape of the day was plain. Every one of them had walked in nervous that morning, and every one of them had found the halls full of people who loved them, aunts at the front of rooms, cousins with the name cards and small private waves, a sister across the rug, and at the end of the little kids' hall a brand new boy who had walked in with none of it, until a six year old decided he could have some of hers. At supper, Ava Grace told them about Micah, in about nine words. And Dad set down his fork and looked at his youngest daughter for a moment with something on his face that was pride, and something older than pride, both at the same time. You were scared, he said, and you went over to him anyway. I didn't stop being scared, Ava Grace said, wanting to be honest about it. I just did it scared. Baby, said Dad, that is the only kind of brave there is. He looked around the table at all of them. God went in with every one of you today, he said, and here's how I know it. He put people there. For most of you he filled the room clear up with your own family. Your aunts, your cousins, your sisters. He stacked it high. Then he looked at Ava Grace, and you he walked you into all that belonging, and he turned you right around and sent you to be it for a boy who didn't have any. That's the whole thing right there. He goes in with you and then quick as he can, he makes you the going in for somebody else. Ava Grace thought about that and about the boy at the Cubbies, and she understood. In the quiet, complete way she understood things, that she had gone to school that morning needing family, and had been handed it stacked to the ceiling and had come home having been the family for somebody who had none. Both were true.

SPEAKER_01 21:01

Both had been God. She could not have told you how she knew that. But she knew it.

SPEAKER_00 21:12

Now, who's ready for brownies?