Blueprints
June 2022
FROM OUR HEAD OF SCHOOL
Over the month of May my family and I have spent hours upon hours in the garden; pulling weeds, transplanting plants, mulching, shoveling, raking, pruning, and planting. We have worked in heat and in rain so that when given the time, we might rest and delight in the fruit of our labors. I have gotten absolutely filthy in the garden. You might be surprised to learn that being covered in dirt is one of my favorite states of being! There is nothing quite like a day spent taking dominion over the backyard. I can now delight in the fact that although we still have a list a mile long, the fruit of our work can already be seen in the vegetables that have started to grow, the pruned wild hedges that have been tamed, and the planted flowers, which will provide us with something beautiful to enjoy when we rest this summer. The work, the sweat, the toil that we put into our work will make the rest even sweeter. Our school year can feel a lot like tending to a garden. We have worked to transplant knowledge from teacher and parent to student so that as our children grow they have the tools they need to equip them to be lifelong learners. We have done much pruning as we have worked with our kids from their first draft to final draft, on finishing ‘both’ sides of the math paper, and bringing projects from a concept to a presentation; all the while instilling in our kids an ethic to not settle for the minimum, but a desire to grow in excellence. We remind them often that we are not here to work for the glory of man, but to do all things unto the Lord. We have spent hours upon hours planting seeds of faith as we walk alongside our kids in their educational journey and their journey of just being a kid and navigating all of the things that come with that. And lastly, we have also spent the year pulling weeds as we have worked to do away with bad habits and uncover and deal with the sins that can choke back growth. It has indeed been a busy season of hard work! (continued)
As we reflect on the progress that has been made this past year, the important lessons that have been learned, the friendships that have been made, and the prayers that have been answered, as we seek and find a season with a different pace, remember that you are doing a good work! As you tend to the needs of your children, as you are faithful to your calling, as you take the time to enjoy the little moments where you show your kids the Love of Christ, you are planting something beautiful. As you enter the season of summer, take time to delight in sweet rest, knowing that you have worked hard during this season. And remember that as we work to educate our children and raise them in the fear and admonition of the Lord, we are doing the hard work that will produce the fruit needed to extend the Gospel to our current culture and future generations.
101 Opportunities by Kellen Meyer
To state the obvious: Summer break has just begun. What may be less obvious to the reader is what that means. It means that all students have approximately a quarter of a year off. One fourth of the pie of their year is empty. It comes out to approximately 100 days of nothing to do. That is 144,000 minutes to binge-watch Netflix, sleep-in until noon, and generally wander around aimlessly complaining to their mothers that they are bored. Scratch that last bit. Only a novice at “Summer-breaking” would ever tell his mother he was bored. Actually, every child in the world has probably only done that once. And this is why: mothers by nature are extremely busy and excellent at delegating that business to lethargic 12-year-olds. Students, this brings up an important point that many young people don’t think about. If your mother or father had 100 free days, how would they fill them? Binge watching Netflix? Endlessly surfing Instagram? Watching cat videos on TikTok? As a thought experiment, try to imagine yourself in 10-15 years. Will you still play the piano? Will you receive a scholarship to play college basketball? Will you have a resumé with work experience and multiple references? Will you have narrowed down your desires and talents to know what career path you want to pursue? Will you finally have finished reading everything by Jane Austin? Will you have read through the whole Bible? Thought experiments like the one above are both important and inevitable. Everyone imagines what he wants to be, or what he could have been. But if you wait until you thirty before you think about this, you will probably be discouraged that you haven’t changed much from when you were thirteen – except perhaps for the fact that you don’t have 100 days off anymore.
To quote a wise man, “The soul of a lazy man desires, and has nothing; but the soul of the diligent shall be made rich (Prov 13:4).” In short, if you never begin working toward your goals, you will never attain them. Excellence in anything requires hours of effort. Freedom requires work. You are not free to play hymns on the piano for church or family devotions if you do not first put in the daily plodding work which that skill requires. You cannot read through the Bible in a moment of passion. And you cannot become fluent in French in a week’s time. So, set yourself a goal—something that you have always wanted to do—and put aside thirty minutes or an hour to that end, or even just ten minutes if that is all you can spare of your 101 Opportunities this Summer. Imagine what you could do. If you are a very slow reader (let’s say it takes you three minutes to read a page) and you read faithfully for your goal of 30 minutes every day, you would get though 10 pages in one day, and 1,000 pages in 100 days. Your diligence would result in having read City of God, Pride and Prejudice, and the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe by the end of the Summer. Besides the obvious bragging points, you will also have subconsciously improved your spelling and vocabulary, and obtained lots of imaginative fodder for writing a book someday — without even trying! If you want to be a blue chip starter on your high school basketball team this coming school year, an hour a day will go a long way to getting you there. Just thirty minutes of study a day is more enough time for you to study for, and take, the private pilot written exam. And even if you did it all: 30 minutes of reading, 30 minutes of aviation study, and an hour of basketball practice, you still would have over 10 hours a day to goof off. In the 1995 BBC television adaption of Pride and Prejudice, the proud, old, Lady Catherine De Bourg says something very insightful: “If I had ever learnt [the piano], I should have been a great proficient.” It is clear from this statement that Catherine De Bourg not only failed to put in the steady labor required to play the piano, but she also cannot see that it is her own laziness which is to blame. In life, the next time you will have as much leisure as you have now, will be when you are old, tired, and retired. Don’t wait until you are the wrinkled De Bourg to turn a profit on the talents God has given to you. The reward of diligence now is a rich and satisfied soul.
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