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----- Original Message -----
From: Debbie Sawczak
To: Lance Muir
Sent: January 02, 2006 17:54
Subject: what I said Hi, Lance! I was at a Leadership Team meeting this
afternoon at the school. That is a joint meeting of the Board Executive, of
which I am part, and the Staff Council, over various big picture items. There
are two of these per year. Anyway, it was my turn to do the devotions, so I
decided to weave together two important strands of my life right now and use the
section from Baxter's The Great Dance, pp 51-54, about the making of
the lake. I read the whole section out, introducing it with the
following:
At the beginning of the year I thought it would be appropriate to go back to one of the basic things that underlies Christian education here, and that is the presence and activity of God in the world, how we embody that presence and activity in all parts of life, and how that is what makes all of our lives holy and worthwhile. That is what we are sharing with our students, and that's what we want them to learn--our students who are very diverse and will all end up doing different things in the world: that their passion for a particular kind of work or a particular part of creation, whatever it is, and the gifts and abilities they bring, and the satisfaction that comes from acting on those--these all originate with the triune God, who desires to include us in his creative and restorative work in the world as something that flows out of our relationship with him. At TD we are preparing kids to take part in that with joy for the rest of their lives, but it's not only for later, or only for them. Even within the school enterprise here and now we each have our gift and passion to bring and our way of participating so that school will be good and accomplish its right purpose. This is a creative work, and a work we do in fellowship with each other and with God.
This is something everybody there understands and resonates with and lives and works for, and they showed enthusiastic appreciation for Baxter's version of it. Just thought I'd share that with you, because that connection made my heart leap. Of course, these two strands of my life are really the same one, after all...
D |
