Thursday Night Lesson

An important lesson to learn early in life is one of personal responsibility. For the next three weeks our Thursday night teaching series will be grounded in responsibility. This week we are focusing on the principle, you reap what you sow. This principle fits perfectly into our overall theme of personal responsibility.

I was never good at speaking Spanish, let alone understanding it. I struggled through it for the first month of my freshmen year until I decided to take advantage of a good friend of mine. He was Mexican and spoke Spanish fluently at home. So we made a little agreement and he allowed me to copy off his tests for the rest of the year. I passed Spanish 1 with a B+. Not too bad if I do say so myself. The following year Spanish 2 came around and we were going to renew our agreement from the following year. I would copy his work and pass the class. However, there was a breakdown in the plan. He ended up taking Spanish 2 over the summer because he wanted to take auto-shop during the normal school year. Because of his choice (notice I put the blame on him) I now had to fight my way through Spanish 2 learning the basics that I was supposed to have already known while keeping up with the more advanced teachings of my Spanish 2 class. Never has the principle you reap what you sow hit closer to home then my first two years of Spanish class.

I ended up passing the class with a C- thanks to some extra credit reports and a website called freetranslator.com (which it turns out does a horrible job of translating English to Spanish). The website barely helped with my homework. I was able to understand the big picture but not all of the details. Example: I understood that I need to give directions on how to get to the library but I had no idea how to give directions. There was no way I could explain to him that the library was on the other side of town, he needed to take the gray taxi, which cost 5 dollars (cinco pesos?), and cross the street to the left.

If high school students understand that in life we reap what we sow apply it to their life it will be amazing to see what they have accomplished ten years from now. What have you been sowing? Are you scared or excited of what you will be reaping?