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.

My own path crossed with Mrs. Phillips’ path nineteen years ago when my family returned to Trinitas after a one-year hiatus in Tallahassee. Mrs. Phillips had begun teaching at Trinitas while we were away. During these nineteen years, it has been my pleasure to labor alongside her and learn much from her. She is the kind of teacher that students never forget.

From the moment a child steps into her classroom, he gets caught up to heaven, as it were, by her love for God. Mrs. Phillips does not just offer her students black-and-white directions for following an impersonal God; she gives them a full-color, moving picture way of being—a paideia, if you will, with God at the center of its gravity. All roads through Mrs. Phillips’s class begin and end at the throne room of God. No facet of life among her students is ever outside the orbit of God’s word, which she dispenses more frequently than the rest of us may say um, like, or right? which, incidentally, she corrects as so much idol speech. She has said with the Psalmist, “You are my portion, O Lord,” but unlike so many of us who have said the same, she has shown us what that looks like clothed in flesh and bone and blood.

And not only have Mrs. Phillips’s students been caught up in her love of God, but also, they have been caught up in her love of whatever she is teaching at the moment. Something about this woman makes nine-year-olds giddy for the study of Grammar. Somehow, she has a whole classroom full of otherwise stalwart students sobbing at the last page of The Shining Company or mourning like distraught Trojans at the death of Hector, that breaker of horses. Every year, she convinces fourth graders to memorize mountains of extra passages for Medieval Day, and they do so joyfully. Her students do what they do because they believe this: if Mrs. Phillips loves a thing, then it must be a thing worth loving.

And how do her students come to such a conclusion? Because they know that she loves them and would never steer them wrong. They see the sacrifices she makes for them. They hear the instruction and correction she offers them. They enjoy the good gifts she gives them. When one of them goes astray, they witness her leave the ninety-nine and go to rescue the one. They know Mrs. Phillips loves them.

Mrs. Phillips is a treasure, and her absence from the classroom will surely leave a space that needs to be filled in a grand way. We are most fortunate, then, that Mrs. Phillips has decided to make her retirement semi- in nature. She is returning to Trinitas in a part-time capacity next year to continue some curriculum development projects she has been working on and to help train teachers. So, even though Mrs. Phillips may not be teaching children next year, she will be blessing future generations by training teachers to become great Trinitas teachers. And the best part of all, some will undoubtedly say, Mrs. Phillips has even agreed to play piano for our concerts next year! So, while she is, indeed, retiring to tend goats and chickens, she is not disappearing from our midst completely, and for that, we are most grateful.