Earlier this week, I wrote in my prayer letter that cultivating gratitude is the gateway discipline to intimacy with God and personal holiness. Cultivating gratitude and intentional mindfulness over the great gifts God has given us allows the Holy Spirit to transform our minds and our hearts, inclining us toward God rather than away from Him, toward optimism and hope rather than our natural inclination toward negativity and despair, and toward holiness rather than worldliness.
Ann Voskamp says that the act of cultivating gratitude, of naming moments of God’s grace, that doing so
…moves beyond the shopping list variety of prayer and into the other side of prayer…the interior of His throne room, the inner walls of His powerful, love-beating heart…And I see it now for what it really is…a dare to name all the ways that God loves me…To move into His presence and listen to His love unending and know the grace uncontainable.
I love Thanksgiving because we can be more reflective and grateful. If you’re so inclined to seek out reasons to be grateful, I want to take this opportunity, as we break, to give you some, as they pertain to our school.
Some of you know this, but my father is in the last stages of Alzheimer’s disease. They refer to Alzheimer’s as “the long goodbye,” and you might not ordinarily consider it to be something that would inspire gratitude. Still, it has given me many opportunities to reflect on my father and his influence on my life, a period now coming to an end.
I’m definitely showing my age, but when I was a young child growing up in Dallas, heading north on the Dallas North Tollway from the Park Cities where I lived meant that once you went under LBJ, you were in the country. And we headed out to the country often, because my dad, who had been a private plane pilot since he was 15 years old, would take me to Addison Airport, then out in the boondocks, to park on the end of the runway and watch the planes land. We would lie on the hood of his 70s-era Oldsmobile Cutlass and stare up at the evening sky. When you were out there, you could observe stars extending for miles and miles, countless in number. Every now and then, I’d see a jet, far overhead, coming out of Love Field and DFW, bound for faraway lands.
But none of these faraway lights captured my attention like the small private planes that landed at Addison every 10–15 minutes. These things buzzed over us at about 150 feet or so, and in so doing, they covered the entire night sky. Their landing lights burned so brightly I had to shield my eyes, and the sound of their engines captured all my attention. In that moment, I could not not be profoundly affected by them. I was overwhelmed.
I was reflecting on this moment with my dad while considering the influence of culture, social media, technology, and other factors competing for our children’s attention. In so many ways, these competitors are like those bright stars, or like those big jets burning off in the distance—glowing, beautiful but dangerous, and captivating. And yet, nothing captures our children’s attention and impacts them more profoundly than the lights that glow closest and brightest, just feet in front of them—their parents, church, and school. Nothing has the potential to transform their lives like these influences, in their presence, loving and teaching them day to day.
School is an interesting thing. As a child transitioning to adulthood, you spend more time in school than on any other activity during your young life. You go there to learn, and learning is the continuous process of failure. You try something. You fail. You improve slightly each time, learning from past failures and progressing repeatedly until, over time, you are built, formed, and shaped into something else—something you were not before, something greater.
But failure isn’t fun. We don’t typically enjoy it. And, as we become close to these people in this school community, they become our family, and sometimes we become frustrated with our family, whether we’re kids or parents. Occasionally, we have conflicts that we have to work through, like all families.
Still, aside from living under our parents’ care, and in some cases even more significantly than that, our K-12 schooling experience molds, shapes, and transforms our identities more profoundly than any other single experience in our lives. We may enjoy our college years and feel connected to that university because we chose it. Still, nothing actually made us who we are—nothing—like the institution that shaped us during our most formative years.
Every school is based on certain values, whether intentionally or by default, and these values are instilled and deeply ingrained in the kids who participate in its process. The values of the school they attend will undoubtedly mold, shape, and transform kids. They will become the people with whom they live, work, and play.
So, the question is not whether they will be formed, but how they will be formed.
As Christian parents, we are called by God—who planned our existence long before we were in our mothers’ wombs and our moms were in their mothers ‘ wombs—to help our children understand that the same Almighty God loves them and declares them His beloved sons and daughters, with whom He is well pleased. To know who they are and whose they are, and to be His disciples, meaning those who do what He does and say what He says. This is God’s homework assignment to us, for all of our homes.
And so, if we’re going to do that, we need a partner to help us, a disciple-making school. If we decide we don’t just want a Jesus-loving school but a great Jesus-loving school, because really, if Jesus’ name is on the door of the school, should it aspire to anything less? It should be a school that trains students’ minds and hearts to the fullest extent of their God-given potential, recognized as an Exemplary Blue Ribbon School by the Department of Education, accredited three times over fifteen years by both accrediting bodies’ highest accreditations, and be awarded the all-around state championship for academics, athletics, and fine arts six times while consistently placing in the top five in every year throughout its existence. If we want a school that has all of that, there isn’t only one in East Texas; there’s only one in the entire State of Texas. It’s Grace Community School.
This gap between Grace and other schools has only widened since the COVID-19 pandemic. We recently tracked our standardized test scores over the past ten years, and while public schools and others are decreasing, Grace’s scores continue to grow.
Furthermore, Grace is uniquely designed to train the next generation to be dedicated disciples of Jesus, wherever they work, live, and play, and to share the gospel of Jesus with the world around them. When our reviewers from the Council on Educational Standards and Accountability, or CESA, came last year, at the end of the visit, one of the reviewers, a founder of CESA, told me that of all the hundreds of Christian schools he’d visited, Grace was the most definitively Christian in culture and spirit he’d ever seen. If you want a distinctly Christ-centered education for your children in this part of East Texas, there aren’t several schools that offer it; there’s only one. This one.
Living here in Tyler, Texas, we only know what we know, and it’s easy to take for granted this gem that God has placed before us. But, whether it’s the high school students who have gathered on Friday and Saturday nights over the past several years at various homes to conduct spontaneous, student-directed worship; the basketball team that baptized a recently transferred teammate in a team member’s swimming pool after leading him to Jesus; or the cross-country parent from another school who called our AD, not to complain but to share that a Grace student just finished sharing the gospel with her son, God is on the move at Grace Community School. He is doing something truly extraordinary here. God is changing this generation in a unique way that’s manifested in this school.
This past year, Grace won the Henderson Cup for the second consecutive year, securing the all-around state championship. We also completed construction on the Center for Innovation and Creativity, a space used for Upper Campus art classes and STEM fabrication. We have expanded our INSPIRE program to enable students to partner with local professionals and tradesmen to capture a vision for what God’s calling on their lives and vocation might look like for them.
We are planning for continued, measured, thoughtful, and prayerful growth through the advent of school choice in the State of Texas, which will provide greater opportunity and accessibility for current and future Grace students. And we are currently laying the groundwork for Phase I of our long-range master plan, which includes a large event center to provide food service for all our students, a competition gym, and new athletic facilities. We are planning to move the elementary campus onto the upper campus and add a second Tyler early elementary campus, as well as tennis courts and a new softball field.
Last week, a school mom spontaneously called me to share her story. Years ago, when she first applied for her son’s admission to Grace, she and her family were in a dark place. She had recently learned that her younger daughter, who was autistic, would not be high-functioning. As a mom, she felt separated and alone, unable to find “their people.” She says she was hurt and angry at the Lord and unloaded all of these feelings on her application. After sending it in, she immediately thought, “They’ll never let my son into Grace once they read that.” Miraculously, for her, however, he was admitted, and they became a part of our community.
Her son was in Sherri Harden’s class, and memorizing Scripture together brought God’s Word back into their home, softening her heart. Now, years later, middle school teachers like Carol Witt have continued to disciple her child, helping him become a young man who loves Jesus. This mom told me that the culture we create at our school unites families to be the hands and feet of Jesus and brings teachers around them who care for kids and love them well. She told me, “Our school brought the goodness of God back into my home. It softened my heart, and it became our people.”
She’s talked to her friends who live in other communities, and they just don’t have this. The other night, at the Grace gala, Louie Giglio shared with me several times that he had interacted with multiple families that evening, and he heard about and sensed a culture and community that he didn’t sense in other places he had been. After the event, he remained and spoke with our families for nearly 45 minutes, when he could have easily left, enjoying this community. He didn’t have to say these things, didn’t have to stay. But he did, because he saw something special here. He saw a community that loves each other. And it’s in the context of this kind of love that children are shaped, molded, and transformed into disciples of Jesus, ready to change their world.
I don’t understand why God chose to bless us, but He has. I know it’s easy to look around the world and be pessimistic about what we see. But I get to come to work every day and see this. You get to drop your kids off at this school and be a part of this community. The Lord is moving in this generation, and I am excited about what I see. I firmly believe that God is going to use this generation in our school to advance His kingdom and change the world, and He’s starting here.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.
James 1:17
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