Sometimes your mind is not your best friend. I realize that may sound strange coming from an educator—someone whose entire professional life is devoted to the life of the mind. But I mean it. There are moments, probably more than we care to admit, where our minds can become the very thing that keeps us from seeing clearly—from seeing what is real, what is good, and what God is doing right in front of us.
At Gibeon, God comes to Solomon in a dream and makes an extraordinary offer: “Ask what I should give you.” Anything: long life, wealth, the defeat of his enemies. A young king, newly crowned, could be forgiven for asking for any of these. Instead, Solomon begins with a confession: “I am only a little child; I do not know how to go out or come in.”
The teacher has stood at this door before. For one good friend of mine, she has stood at her classroom door eighteen times before, in fact—eighteen first days, eighteen classes of new names she will know cold by October, eighteen opening prayers said so naturally that the words are part of her very being. Like so many of the experienced educators in our communities, she knows what the first few weeks hold before they happen. She could do this important and challenging work in her sleep.
One of the small gifts of writing these meditations is the conversation they start. Every Monday, I hear from members of the NAES family sharing follow-up thoughts from what I have written. I have come to treasure these emails—not just for affirmation—but also for the way that good readers can share perspectives on things that might not have been “front of mind” while crafting a short, weekly message for the community.
There is a kind of teaching that cannot be delivered. Rather, we can only make space for it. Four-year-olds are natural philosophers. They ask “why” without embarrassment. They have not absorbed the message that so many of us picked up along the way: not-knowing is supposed to be shameful. They hold mystery lightly because they have not yet been taught to fear it. Somewhere between kindergarten and high school, most of us lose this. We learn that questions have a shelf life and that a raised hand that isn’t followed by a tidy answer is a small embarrassment to be moved past quickly.
Covenant. It runs through the scriptures and through our tradition. It is the foundation for baptism, for every vow made at the altar, and for the kind of community we are called to be. However, a covenant is very different from a contract, which tends to be more familiar to us in modern life.
I am excited that Dr. Lisa Miller will be our keynote speaker at NAES Biennial Conference 2026 in November. A clinical psychologist at Columbia University, Dr. Miller’s research focuses on the positive impact of spiritual practices. Her book, The Awakened Brain, makes a claim that shouldn’t surprise us, but which she arrives at through decades of neuroscience: people with an active spiritual practice are measurably more resilient, less prone to mental health challenges, and more capable of meeting hardship without being undone by it. Her research indicates that specific belief isn’t as important as practice: the sustained, embodied habit of prayer, silence, and attention to what is greater than the self.
Marcus Aurelius, at the height of his power as emperor of Rome, sat down to write what we now call the Meditations—and he did not begin with philosophy. He began with people. Teacher after teacher, mentor after mentor—he named each of them, and named what they gave him, before he said anything else. Here was quite possibly the most powerful person in the world, and his first act was gratitude. Not ideas or accomplishments, but people.
This is the final meditation of the year, and as I have done before, I want to close with a few books I’m excited about. One of the things I genuinely cherish about summer is the opportunity to read in more relaxed environments. Not having to rush from one appointment to the next, I can enjoy an unhurried moment by the pool or a quiet morning that isn’t dominated by rushing to the airport to catch a flight. People ask me fairly often what is on my reading list, and I want to share it with you now, before you (hopefully) manage to unplug at least a little from email in the weeks ahead.
Summer arrives, yet the work never seems to stop. For some it is the inbox that never fully empties. For others it is the curriculum unit that needs rethinking, the struggling family still on your mind that would benefit from a check in, or the chapel talk you want to get right before September. The particular burden varies by role. The weight is recognizable across all of them.
