Wisdom From an Owl – Lessons for My Son

When I was doing research for my book Divine Beings – the Spiritual Lives and Lessons of Animals, I asked dozens of animals the same three questions: What is your spiritual gift? What is your spiritual lesson? What message do you want to share with humans?

Each animal’s answers touched me in some part of my life but the situation with my son this week has me evoking the wise words of a great gray owl: take care of yourself and accept the consequences.

As we wrap up this school year, my son Zane has quite a few missing assignments to turn in before the grading deadline. He is a smart kid, but he just isn’t invested in his grades or doing his best. He just likes to get it done and move on as quickly as he can.

He also likes to procrastinate. That’s why this past week was filled with long nights of making up long overdue assignments.There was much hair-pulling and teeth-gnashing on my part as he took his sweet time doing each assignment.

And then Thursday evening, he came into my room crying. “Mom, if I flunk 4th grade, will I not be able to get into Stanford for college?” Stanford? Last I heard I didn’t even want to go to college and now it’s Stanford?

“Am I going to flunk 4th grade if I have missing assignments? What if I flunk one subject, do I flunk all of 4th grade? Can I still get into a good college?”

Stanford, a good college, and flunking are not part of our usual conversations and definitely weren’t in the conversational repertoire this week, so my guess was his teacher was laying it on a little thick to light a fire under the butts of the kids with outstanding assignments due.

I reassured him that he was going to finish all his missing assignments so flunking 4th grade was not going to happen and Stanford was not something he had to worry about right now.

“Mr. P said we have to turn in all our missing assignments by Friday if we care about our grades.”

Well, it sounds like you care about your grade, so let’s get going on finishing your work so you can turn it in tomorrow!

Zane finished most of his work and I assured him that I’d talk to his teacher and make sure he could turn in the last few assignments on Monday. As we were putting his completed work into his backpack, I found an old assignment crumpled at the bottom of his backpack and sticky with something from lunch several days ago. Ugh. More work to turn in, but this one had to be re-done since it was such a mess!

Zane not only re-did the assignment, he improved it, saying that he thought he could do better on it than he had the first time. He was taking care of himself and accepting the consequences for his actions! It was a School Night Miracle!