A series of events?

The end of Term 1 arrives this week.

For some, it feels too early, as if the school year has only recently started to ramp up – junior soccer has started, Easter has recently passed, and the routines of school are just starting to become familiar. For others, the break cannot come quickly enough – we have had a busy schedule already of camps, carnivals (athletics, swimming for Secondary, cross country for Primary) and student learning. 

There can be a danger in listing what we have done, as though school and life are no more than a series of events to be experienced. I hope that the deeper reflection for us at the end of Term 1, is that it has been a period of growing, of character shaping or ‘formation’.

“There can be a danger in listing what we have done, as though school and life are no more than a series of events to be experienced.”

At our Christian Education National Executive Conference in March, one of the speakers noted that relationships ‘are the primary way that we are formed’. Sam Burrows outlined that we are ‘relationally constituted’, ‘relationally bound’, and ‘relationally entangled’ – no-one exists in isolation. 

We talk a lot about relationship and community at Calvin. We do not live in isolation and each of us makes sacrifices and adjustments, gives and receives as part of a school community. This might be as simple as making space for someone in our groups or wearing a uniform well as an indication of our sense that we belong. If we want it all our own way and seek to have others serve our personal goals, we end up in conflict.

Easter is a reminder that God sacrificed everything for the sake of relationship and to restore what had been broken. A picture of the ability for this one central relationship to change everything is captured in Galatians 2:20b: ‘The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me’. As Albert Einstein is reported to have said, ‘Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile’.

Scott Ambrose - Principal