Trinitas Blog

This week we celebrated the retirement of one of Trinitas’s most beloved teachers of all time. After twenty years of teaching in the Grammar School, Mrs. Wendy Phillips is retiring from that role. Many alumni, parents of alumni, students, and faculty members gathered for a time of remembering, gift-giving, and neck-hugging to send Mrs. Phillips out in style.

Last time out, we ended our discussion with a list of questions. We established the fact that there is no magic in those questions. They are merely questions that leave space for your child to tell his story in a way that he hasn’t even thought of yet. You can think of other questions like these that will help peel back the layers, and you can change them to fit the moment. The point is to get to the sin that motivated the action. For example, striking someone in anger is a sinful behavior, but oftentimes, there is something else motivating that anger and violence, whether pride or envy or covetousness or something else. If we don’t work to get at that sin that is rooted down in the heart, it is going to continue to manifest itself on the surface somehow—this time it was anger and violence, but next time, it could be something different.  

Picking up the thread from a couple of weeks back, I want to discuss correction a little further. We have talked about what correction is, why we must correct, and why our children don’t always love correction. Now, we’ll examine correction that addresses patterns of sin or even besetting sins in our children's lives.

Sometimes, our children have a bigger problem putting off sin than we had hoped. Perhaps it begins with a single event. We correct and move on. Then the very next week, here we are again in the same situation. Coincidence? Maybe. You correct again and move on. But oh, no! In a matter of days, here we are again. Now, to be fair, there are so many variables here that it’s hard to reduce this to a few brief words. For example, the type of sin dictates how we address it. Is it forgetfulness, gossip, disobedience, disrespect, unkindness, laziness? And there are plenty of other variables, as well, that have a bearing on how we proceed. We can’t get into all those methods here, so we’ll stick to a conversation about principles.  

Any organization that is serious about building and then guarding a particular culture is going to have a certain rubric for what kind of folks it invites to join the organization. Trinitas is that kind of organization. If Trinitas were a university, the admissions process would be labeled “highly selective” by the agencies that report on such things. Trinitas’s selectivity, though, is not based on GPA, test scores, or even IQ tests. Nor is it based on tax bracket, neighborhood, or make and model of the family’s transportation. Now, to be fair, students must be able to succeed academically, and families must be able to pay tuition in order to be enrolled at Trinitas, but those aren’t the first determiners for who is admitted and who isn’t. The first determiner is like-mindedness with the school, and this is assessed in the Trinitas Family Conference.

Over the past couple of posts, I have attempted to define biblical correction and to show that God requires it of us. Not only does he require adults to correct ourselves with His word as the standard, but also, He requires us to correct our children, “to put them right,” according to the standard found only in God’s word. Seems like a slam dunk, right? Well, maybe not exactly.

If your children sometimes bristle at correction, or they listen attentively and then go on doing what they were doing, or they give you a thousand excuses for why their behavior was justified and never want to own up to any wrongdoing, or they are compliant when you are near but behave like the devil when you are away, then read on.

In our last blog post, we talked about what correction of children is and touched on a few reasons why it is no longer common. This week, we’ll dig a little deeper into what biblical correction is as we seek answers to why this correction is so important.

We’ve all seen it. You’re in the checkout line at the grocery store when you hear a child arguing with his mother in the line ahead of you. He wants some candy, a toy, a drink, or who knows what? His mother doesn’t want him to have it, so she begins with a flat “No.” He balks, stomps his foot, whines. Mom redirects, “Look at this nice cereal Mommy is buying for you.” His whines become wails. Mom ignores. He falls to his knees, wailing louder now. Mom quickly drops to his level and begins to speak sweetly in an attempt to reason with him, “Honey, this is not the way we behave in public; you are causing quite a scene. Get up, now.” He throws himself face-down and begins thrashing his arms and legs, wailing all the while. Mom rises, grabs the item her child wants off the shelf and thrusts it into his hands. If she acknowledges you at all, she likely says, “He usually doesn’t act like this; he’s just hungry (or tired, sleepy, out of his routine, having a bad day, mourning the loss of a stuffed animal, et cetera).”

Choosing a school for your children is one of the most important decisions you will make. Only the home and church affect the upbringing and therefore the child's future as much as the school he or she attends. Think about it: from kindergarten through twelfth grade, a child spends more than 16,000 hours in school, and that doesn’t count homework, studying with school friends, or extra-curricular activities organized and managed by the school. Sleeping is the only other single activity that will consume as much of your child’s time during that season of life.