La Rentrée !

Tomorrow is a big day in the life of the Bixby household. For the very first time since our first child was born six years ago, we are sending our children away from our home and into the big, wide world without their Mommy and Daddy! Tomorrow is the French rentrée. It literally means a “return”, and is commonly used in French to designate the end of summer vacation and the beginning of a new school year. We have been trying to prepare mentally and emotionally for this day for many months now, and it is hard to believe the time has actually come.

In planning for our enculturation into French life, one of the aspects we had to consider as a family is how we would choose to educate our children. While Tim and I were both home schooled for most of our lives (I attended Christian school during my elementary years), we have prayerfully considered this possibility of placing our children into the French public school system, at least for these initial years while they are young, for a long time now. Philosophically, being a part of the same educational system as are most of those to whom we plan to minister seemed like a wise move. Not only would it allow us to better understand the life and struggles of our French brothers and sisters in Christ, it would also open a door of opportunity for getting to know many unsaved French people for the purpose of developing redemptive relationships with a people who are naturally very private and hard to get to know. In addition, there is the aspect of French enculturation for our children. I have especially seen the need for this immersion into an all-French context in the intervening time since we arrived two months ago. While our children have adapted very well and are quite content in their new French home, even having begun in this short time to learn bits of the language, I am confident that this educational process, especially in the area of language-learning, will greatly advance our enculturation goals.

The process of actually getting our children into the school system has been a bit more complicated and involved than we had originally expected, mostly due to the timing of our arrival. When we first went to register our children at the town hall early in July, we were told that the (neighborhood) school our children should be attending was already full and therefore we would have to be transferred to another school in the district. That announcement threw us into a whirlwind of uncertainty that was not completely resolved until just yesterday. We were kept on a waiting list at our neighborhood school but told that our chances were slim of being admitted. We also had friends here in our church who wanted desperately to help us get special permission to send our children to their children’s school in another town. Therefore, for an extended period of time we were left wondering which one of the three schools our children would ultimately be allowed to attend, and we had to patiently wait for our requests to get through the system during a month of national vacation in which very few French people actually work regular hours. Finally on Monday of this week, with the other two doors apparently closed, we interviewed with the directors of our third-choice school (the one to which the town hall had recommended we transfer), and were settling into the idea of them going to that school. While we were at our interviews on Monday, we received a telephone message on our home phone that there was now room at the original school in our neighborhood into which our children should have been inscribed. So a mere 48 hours before their first class, the decision was finalized that our children would be able to attend our neighborhood school. And that is how we have now come to Wednesday, the day before the rentrée, and our children are finally set and ready to go to school at École Jules FERRY de Pessac tomorrow morning at 8:30.

As a mother, I have to confess to a little anxiety about this whole process. Over the last few weeks I have viewed a number of my stateside Facebook friends’ pictures of their children’s first day back to school. These pictures have revealed the smiling faces of neatly dressed children, many of them headed off to meet their Christian teachers and Christian friends at their Christian schools. Others of them sit at a table in their kitchen or family room with siblings close by, hovering over their parents’ choice of Christian school textbooks in their home school. And all of them are studying in their native tongue, English, and will therefore be able to focus on learning their course material and not just trying to figure out how to survive in a foreign context. I must own up to a little bit of jealousy and have occasionally wondered if I am depriving my children of the opportunities I should be giving them. But Tim and I both remain convinced that God has led us to this point, and He has answered our prayers by directing us to École Jules FERRY.

Our children themselves, to this point at least, have not displayed the least bit of anxiety and are really quite excited about their first day of school tomorrow. While I am conscious of the fact that one day of school could change their perspective, I am very pleased and excited by their eager anticipation and am praying that God will continue to keep their excitement level high. Will you pray with us that God would keep Micaiah and Miriam safe and secure in His care, that their minds would quickly adapt to the new language and environment, and that God would accomplish all His purposes for us as a family through this new adventure? In the future, we will need God’s wisdom to know how long this form of education will be best for our children, and if and when we should switch to home schooling. For the present we are convinced that this is what God has for us, and I am claiming these verses that I read just this week in Psalm 121: “The LORD will protect you from all evil; He will keep your soul. The LORD will guard your going out and your coming in from this time forth and forever” (vv. 7-8, NASB).