Thank you for a great year. Based on any external metric that schools commonly use for comparison and based on our own internal metrics that we use to measure ourselves against our mission, God has blessed Cary Christian School.
A year in a school is bigger than measurable outcomes, because each point of data stirs a memory of a particular meaningful moment where God revealed His glory through a student, a teacher, a parent, or an event. Last week, we celebrated our 57 graduates and 13 years of particularly meaningful moments where God revealed His glory. The week before that we had our new family dessert. One hundred new students will drive past our oak tree in the fall.
Those graduates and their families built this place, drove the mission, and created our community. One family told me that they have had at least one child at Cary Christian School for 20 years. It is hard to imagine this place without them here. Now, they hand their legacy over to these new families.
Over time, Cary Christian School will become more theirs than ours. Each day new families will create their own particularly meaningful moments. They will create new traditions and choose to bring an end to certain practices that our graduates and their families found sacred and integral to the Cary Christian experience.
Change, in the end, is the nature of things. And while the graduating families may grieve certain losses, they will celebrate your forward progress if it is built on an understanding what God used them to do:
- Celebrate the external achievements: the scholarships earned, the state championships won, and the buildings built.
- Then, go deeper. While what we now enjoy could not exist without hard work and great sacrifice, what we enjoy is bigger than any achievement of man or accomplishment. It’s a sentiment: to be precise it’s love.
- That “bigger thing,” the thing that is bigger than measurable outcomes is the sentiment that has emerged over the last 30 years. Remember, there are people who are no longer on campus who love this place, who love its mission, and most importantly, who love the people.
Do not hear, in this point of reflection, a request to stand still or to preserve the past, but a demand that you do not take what you enjoy for granted. These three loves (place, mission, and each other) are dependent on each other. If one goes, they all go, and yet, regardless of their interdependence, they continually work against each other.
- We love this place. Here’s the tension: Intentionality created the comfort we feel, and the comfort we feel leads us to relax. Thus, we rest from hard missional tasks, and we avoid uncomfortable conversations that we need to have with the people we love.
- We love our mission. Mission-focused people often disregard the people and the places that make mission fulfillment possible. In our urgency to complete a task, we can easily forget that it is people who must fulfill those tasks, and,
to make life more difficult, we need people to fulfill those tasks with a thoughtfulness that drives purpose into the culture and brings beauty out of the campus. - We love each other. In the end, it’s the people who make the place special. The love we have for each other energizes us to do hard missional work, to drive purpose into the culture, and to bring beauty out of the campus. If we are not careful, however, our love for each other will lead us to tolerate, to support, and even to adopt the bad behavior of the people we love. Thus, instead of calling them to do the next right thing, we laugh when they mock missional tasks, or we protect them when they do work that is not at the standard that built this place.
Thank you, class of 2026. You have built something extraordinary. Welcome class of 2039. We cannot wait to experience God’s glory through you.
