Trinitas Blog

A couple of weeks back I wrote about the need for parents to help their children mature spiritually so that their faith is not something they cast off as soon as they leave the home. Of course, there are lots of scriptural principles for our teaching our children to love God in word and deed. Two of my favorites are from Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 6. The first is a promise of generational blessing to those who love God and keep His commandments; the second is a command to parents to teach our children God’s words and ways every minute of every day. Perhaps the most often quoted of these kinds of passages is Proverbs 22:6, “Train up a child in the way he should go, And when he is old he will not depart from it.” It is abundantly clear to me that even though we are supported in our work by the church and (if we are so blessed) the Christian school, the responsibility for training our children in the faith still rests with us as parents.

In Eph 4:3, Paul says the Ephesians ought to be “eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.” While we know Paul wrote this letter specifically to the church at Ephesus, and with a specific context in mind, we also know that if Paul’s exhortation was true for Christians at Ephesus, it is true for us at Trinitas. Maintaining the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace is no easy task, though, no matter where it is being attempted because we’re all sinners, especially talented at offending each other, hurting each other’s feelings, and generally getting in each other’s way. But when the place you’re attempting to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace is a school where 200 people are living in community each day, it is a difficult task to say the least.

Well, it’s that time of year again. Thousands of people—no, millions of people—woke up on New Year’s Day and resolved either to stop a bad habit or to start a good one. Some probably resolved to do both. According to various sources on the ever accurate and reliable internet, some of the most common resolutions Americans make on any given New Year’s Day are to lose weight, get fit, quit smoking, get organized, spend more time with family, get out of debt, or learn something new.

Perhaps we should ponder the meaning of the word “education” before we try to discern what a good education is. The word is derived from the Latin infinitive educāre or educere or a combination of the two. Either way, the word carries the meaning “to lead” or even “to lead out.” Understood this way, it is easy to see that any good education must lead the learner to something. Anything that claims to be education but is passive in its application, perhaps allowing the learner to find his own way, isn’t exactly education. To be educated then is to necessarily be led out of ignorance and into a particular knowledge, a particular way of understanding that produces wisdom. Such is a proper classical Christian education.

“I wasted time and now doth time waste me.” This is the lament of Shakespeare’s King Richard II. He was an idle and indecisive king whose crown was stolen from him because he wasted his past, and as he speaks these words he anticipates living out the rest of his days in prison or exile.  Another of Shakespeare’s great figures, Hamlet, is also famous for wasting time. After the ghost of his father appears and burdens him with the urgent task of vengeance, Hamlet spends the next four acts of the play finding excuses not to go through with it, because he fears what the future might hold.

We spend a lot of time thinking about our future.  People ask you what you want to be when you grow up? Where are you going to college? What are you going to do with your life? What job do you want? There is much we don’t know for certain about our future. But today I want to tell you something about your future.

In the last post we anticipated what habits would help husbands and fathers to be oriented toward the life of the home in ways that produce good fruit. What follows is not comprehensive. In fact it may seem simple, but simple things are often most important because they are most basic to life: plants need watering to live, pets need feeding to flourish, and man, well, man needs spiritual habits to cultivate holiness.

In the last post I ended with a thesis:

“A man’s improvement in the home comes through reorientation of his heart and habits.”

Let’s start with the heart.

Any notion that coming home to escape the hardships of the world also involves escaping the hardships of the home is a not-so-subtle retreat from a man’s godly responsibility. Worse, it is a lack of faith in God’s promise that great joy, the fullness of life, comes from precisely this labor from which Dad often wants to escape.